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Natasha Lennard (Intercept (5/20/25): “News organizations should…have long ago stopped affording the Trump administration such credulous coverage.”

A FAIR post (5/22/25) on New York Times publisher A.G. Sulzberger’s selective defense of press freedom (New York Times, 5/13/25) referred to him as someone who “clings to the false god of journalistic neutrality at all costs.” Natasha Lennard’s piece in the Intercept (5/20/25) on media coverage of the Trump administration’s arrest of Rep. LaMonica McIver (D–N.J.) illustrates what we mean by this.

McIver, Lennard wrote, was charged with “assaulting” an ICE officer when she “attempted to conduct an oversight visit earlier this month at a massive, new ICE detention facility in her hometown of Newark, New Jersey.” Such oversight is part of representatives’ constitutional duty, and is specifically authorized by law in the case of ICE facilities. Lennard noted that if this had happened in a different country—one not favored by Washington—this would have been reported, accurately enough, as something like, “Regime targets opposition politician with fabricated charges for carrying out oversight.”

But as it happened in the United States, that’s not how leading US news outlets—including the New York Times (5/19/25)—reported it. “Rep. McIver Charged With Assault Over Clash Outside Newark ICE Center” was the Times headline over an article that followed the Times‘ he said/she said stylebook. “Both sides have pointed to videos from the chaotic scuffle…to accuse each other of instigating the altercation.”

As the Intercept‘s subhead remarked, “You’d never know reading the New York Times that charges against Rep. LaMonica McIver are nothing but an authoritarian attack.” The Times article did not provide the context that ICE has been seizing immigrants without due process and shipping them to foreign prisons in violation of court orders—background that is critical to judging whether the prosecution of a lawmaker that attempted to investigate the agency is in good faith.

“Clash” is a useful word if you want to make an unarmed legislator sound like an evenly matched adversary for Homeland Security commandos (New York Times, 5/19/25).

In his essay, Sulzberger warned that without press freedom, people might not know when their rights are being taken away, or democratic structures undermined:

Without a free press, how will people know if their government is acting legally and in their interest? How will people know if their leaders are telling the truth? How will people know if their institutions are acting to the benefit of society? How will people know if their freedoms are being sustained, defended and championed—or eroded by forces that seek to replace truth and reality with propaganda and misinformation?

But if you follow the Times‘ approach to journalism, in which you must never say that something is happening if someone in power claims it is not happening, then your audience won’t know when their government is acting illegally, or denying truth and reality. (“You can’t just say the president is lying,” Times reporter Elisabeth Bumiller told a DC panel—Extra!, 1–2/05—expressing an actual rule that was enforced even on the paper’s opinion columnists.)

Journalists inevitably, inescapably, have values, and those values necessarily affect what they communicate to their audiences. If they value democracy, then they communicate to their audience that arrests of opposition lawmakers are dangerous. If, on the other hand, they value the appearance of neutrality above all else, then the message readers will get is: Who’s to say?

ACTION ALERT: You can send a message to the New York Times at [email protected] or via Bluesky: @NYTimes.com. Please remember that respectful communication is the most effective. Feel free to leave a copy of your message in the comments thread here.

Janine Jackson interviewed UNRWA USA’s Mara Kronenfeld about Israel’s aid blockade for the May 16, 2025, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

Middle East Eye (5/14/25)

Janine Jackson: It’s long been said of the turmoil in Israel/Palestine that your understanding is shaped by when you’re told to start the clock. Corporate news media’s deliberate timekeeping sets up the story we’re used to, in which Palestinians are always attacking and Israel is always only responding, and Israel’s long, violent occupation, and now genocidal operations against the people of Gaza, for example, becomes a matter of recurring “clashes” between presumably balanced forces.

Into this landscape comes the 77th anniversary of the Nakba, May 15. For media, talking frankly about the 15,000 Palestinians killed, the at least 750,000 driven from their homes and land, for the 1948 founding of the state of Israel might force a context into coverage of today’s events, beyond vague gestures toward the region’s “troubled history.”

We’re learning how hard some will fight to prevent that understanding. In the struggle to defend Palestinian lives, the protection of history is tied up with the witnessing of today.

Mara Kronenfeld is executive director at UNRWA USA. UNRWA is the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East. She joins us now by phone; welcome to CounterSpin, Mara Kronenfeld.

Mara Kronenfeld: Thank you so much. It’s a pleasure to be here.

Al Jazeera (5/15/25)

JJ: I want to ask you about attacks on aid and about disinformation, but we are recording on May 15. I just wonder, first, what your thoughts are on what this time of remembering, of acknowledgement, means today.

MK: Yes, it’s a day, a difficult day, any May 15, and this is of course the 77th commemoration of the Nakba, but it’s only that much more painful after this morning, hearing that Gaza is yet again, yet another day of major attacks. We’re hearing of upwards of 100 civilians killed just this morning, and 77 yesterday. So it’s a painful reminder that the struggle continues, that Palestinian fathers, mothers, children are under attack, and that Palestinians, like any other people on Earth, want to live free of occupation, and have control over themselves and sovereignty. And this seems well farther off than it has, unfortunately, for a long time.

JJ: Gaza has been under blockade since March, listeners will know, the hunger, the lack of medicine, the repeated displacement, destruction of hospitals—after decades, of course, of occupation—all contributing to the nightmare. But now we also see targeted, lethal attacks on aid workers themselves, and efforts to—you could say “politicize,” but really criminalize the work of aid organizations. This seems new, or is it?

MK: Yeah, there’s been a long-time campaign, frankly, against UNRWA, the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees. I wish I could say this is new. I think the vehemence and the coordinated aspects of the attacks are perhaps new, but UNRWA has always represented a threat, in the sense that it appears to guarantee the right of return for Palestine refugees, even though that right of return is embodied under a separate UN resolution. But it represents that, in fact, the 5.6–some million refugees that UNRWA is serving are refugees and, in fact, do hope to return home to a land that is under their sovereign control, in whatever political solution the political parties determine at the right time.

The attack against UNRWA—and by the way, I am the executive director of UNRWA USA, which is actually a separate, independent, US-based NGO. Our mission is really to raise awareness about the work of the UN agency UNRWA, and raise funds for its relief and development programs in the Middle East, of course, for these 5.6 million refugees. But we have seen the propaganda against UNRWA, and, by extension against our small team, absolutely ramp up in the days and months and, unfortunately, now years following the horrific events on October 7.

You can almost directly link the attacks on UNRWA to, yes, the fact that it embodies this right of return, but also UNRWA is simply being attacked because it keeps Palestinians alive. And as we’ve seen in this brutal, 20-month assault on Gaza, on the civilians of Gaza, collective punishment, and now we’re into almost the 70th day of a total blockade on food and medical aid-–again, collective punishment on an entire population, including 1 million children. We’re seeing that any attempt to keep this population alive, educated, sheltered is a threat to this current extremist government in Israel. And that’s the very reason UNRWA is attacked.

Al Jazeera (3/13/24)

JJ: It’s a kind of a pincer move, because there are the actual missiles being dropped on warehouses where UNRWA is working, and on medical centers, and then also this simultaneous drive to say that UNRWA is not a legitimate organization, that really it’s just part of Hamas, and that therefore it should be sued into extinction, is my understanding.

MK: Yes, there’s attacks on many levels, and I will say, and I think it’s worth mentioning here, that there are probably hundreds of accusations against UNRWA by the Israelis. The commissioner general of UNRWA Philippe Lazzarini has consistently and continually stated that if there are allegations, then UNRWA needs to see the documentation, needs to see the evidence.

Israel has a history of making allegations, of calling many different independent individuals and organizations “Hamas” or “terrorists” without any evidence. UNRWA cannot respond to every piece of conjecture in an extremely politicized environment. But in the one case where an accusation by Israel, that 19 members of UNRWA’s 33,000 employees may or may not have taken part in the horrific events of October 7, in only nine of these cases where Israel actually presented evidence, I have to say that if authenticated and corroborated—it hasn’t been—but if it could have indicated that [they] were guilty, UNRWA has done the right thing, in the sense of firing these individuals.

UNRWA’s Commissioner General Philippe Lazzarini has stated emphatically that the engagement of any UNRWA employees in such activities, if so, if it were true, would, in fact, be an appalling betrayal of both Palestine refugees, the United Nations and UNRWA specifically. UNRWA made very clear that it has no tolerance for such activity.

You said in the beginning of your introduction, the corporate media have chosen to tell a much different story, and I can tell you, working at UNRWA USA for five years, a story that’s fundamentally not true. And then you have attacks by certain members of this administration, which try to claim that UNRWA does not have immunity like every other United Nations entity, and that somehow UNRWA, established in 1949 by mandate of the member parties of the UN, is not a subsidiary of the United Nations, when Israel itself calls UNRWA a subsidiary of the United Nations.

FAIR.org (8/22/23)

The attacks, if they weren’t so dangerous and deadly—as yet, there’s been over 280 UNRWA staff members killed—would be laughable, but unfortunately we are in this crazy media environment, where too many allegations are somehow not checked, or repeated, and there are certain political opinions that hold sway in certain corporate newsrooms. That’s why I can tell you, as an individual, I’m so thankful for your work, for FAIR’s work, and for those who really try to understand what is underneath all of the propaganda and disinformation that we see every day.

JJ: I’m going to ask you a little bit more about media in a second, but I just, as a point of information, because it can get lost: Israel, as an occupier, is required by law to allow aid, is it not? I mean, they’re required by international law to allow aid access into occupied territories.

MK: A hundred percent. That is one violation of international law, absolutely. And we’re talking about, again, into the 70th day of a population of 1.9 to 2 million being denied commercial goods, but a thousand times worse, food and aid.

And I don’t know about you, Janine, but I’ve seen, every day now, more and more photos of children who look malnourished. Just this morning, a horrific image of a child who was bombed, and one leg was severely injured, and the other leg is so skinny, it’s barely there. It is something that I wonder—we all wonder, those of us who are compassionate and thinking individuals—how the world can watch and let this happen, how the uproar is not loud enough to stop the withholding of basic food and medicine, now for over 70 days.

Reuters (5/13/24)

JJ: Many are wondering why the response from the world is not what we think it should be, but we think it merits, and we—you and I—understand that media do play a role there. Using aid as a lure to drive Palestinians south, suggesting that providing food and water to people in Gaza is somehow akin to terrorism. This is part of what Francesca Albanese, I just heard, called “the tapestry of crimes against the totality of the people.” And I know that you and others contend that these crimes are made possible, in part, by dehumanization of Palestinian people, and that news media play a central role there.

MK: Yes, yes, I’ve seen that and it’s been both in my professional and my personal life. I happen to be Jewish, married to a Muslim gentleman, and I think about my own kids, and I think about, in their lifetime, are we going to be more concerned about antisemitism or Islamophobia and anti-Arab hate? And while both are on the rise, I’m more concerned, in fact, about the portrayal of Muslims and Arabs in the media. And I think that this dehumanization of Palestinians is unique, definitely, because of the politicization of this issue. But it does have roots in the dehumanization of Muslims and Arabs that, unfortunately, our country has a long history of.

Intercept (1/9/24)

And definitely the media has played a huge role in furthering this dehumanization. There was a report out on a study of some thousand articles from the major newspapers, the New York Times, the Washington Post and the LA Times, and this was looking at all the articles, about a thousand articles, following the horrible attacks on October 7.

And what we saw is that “Israeli” or “Israel,” both terms, generally got far more mentions in news stories than “Palestinians” or variations thereof, even as Palestinian deaths massively far outpaced Israeli deaths. And we see really condemnatory adjectives, like “slaughter,” “massacre,” “horrific,” when they’re applied to Israeli citizens, not when they’re applied to Palestinian victims, even at a time when the Israeli military had killed upwards of 6,000 children in Gaza.

And what is extremely frightening is seeing the genocidal language of this extremist government, and seeing almost that idea that we hear from this government that the children of Gaza are born evil; they’re born “snakes.” Imagine a news agency saying this about Jewish people, about my ancestors, that somehow they were born evil, they were born snakes. This kind of language being used has only served to dehumanize and prepare for the genocidal actions we’re seeing right now.

But, unfortunately, our media is culpable in making Palestinian victims, changing them from victims to terrorists, including a million children who are trying to stay alive at this very minute, let alone their mothers and let alone their fathers. We’ve seen Palestinian fathers absolutely dehumanized at a level just outrageous, and which doesn’t match with any of my experiences, my long experiences, living and working in the Middle East region.

JJ: On top of the more than 52,000 people killed since October 7, we have Israeli officials now openly declaring plans to reoccupy Gaza indefinitely, to use destitution and displacement to force Palestinians out, though neighboring countries say they don’t plan to take them. I would say appropriate reporting would not look like this, from the Guardian on May 6, that said that an Israeli government minister has vowed that “Gaza will be entirely destroyed” and Palestinians will “leave in great numbers to third countries.” And the Guardian said, this is “raising fears of ethnic cleansing in the occupied territory.”

I feel that along with the day-to-day dehumanization and erasure of Palestinian lives, there’s also this kind of diplomatic dance that’s always like, It might turn into something that could be bad. There are warnings that it might be something to worry about. And it kind of leaves you to wonder: Media, what would you do if you thought it was ethnic cleansing? Why is it always “about to be,” or it’s someone “claiming that it is”? There’s a hesitancy that, to me, is very frustrating.

Mara Kronenfeld: “Why hasn’t something happened to stop the killing already? And the displacement of 90% of the population?”

MK: Oh yeah. So we’ve seen that around famine, that in other situations in which famine was predicted at the level, it has been predicted at different times than Gaza, it was declared famine. And we just don’t see that kind of collective statement or action when it comes to Gaza.

And what we’re seeing now looks very much like ethnic cleansing. I’m not an international law specialist, but one does wonder why we’re not talking about interventions now, as opposed to some moment in the future, when we’ve already seen likely well more than 52,000 deaths. That’s the count that the Ministry of Health has tried to keep going, despite being nearly bombed out of existence. But the Lancet, the British Lancet, had stated in that second report towards the end of 2024, that the actual death count was probably more like 60,000 in the first six months of 2024. And if we count the second six months, when the bombing was even more brutal, we could be talking of upwards of 120,000 deaths. And at the very minimum, we’re talking about 17,000 children. The true number is probably much, much higher.

So your question is very well taken. Why hasn’t something happened to stop the killing already? And the displacement of 90% of the population, from families displaced over 12 times in the last two years, with just a blanket and the clothes they’re wearing to carry with them from place to place?

The depravity goes on and on. And I found myself repeating the statistics for the last 20 months, and I’m just continually shocked that I’m not seeing, the horror that I feel, I’m not seeing it reflected in the corporate media.

And I tell everyone I talk to that we just can’t rely on traditional media. We have to be looking at video straight from Gaza, we have to be looking at independent news sites, because we’re just simply only going to get a very small part of the story.

Stanford Daily (5/21/25)

JJ: Finally, we see that, despite the virulence, the wildness of the crackdown—student reporters being suspended, being arrested, simply for reporting on police assaults on campus protesters, the circulating of Do Not Hire lists of people who protest, threats to strip nonprofit status from groups that step out of line—it’s just not working. It’s silencing many people, of course, but at the same time, more and more people are speaking up. Stanford students have just started a hunger strike. Polls are showing large numbers of people don’t want their tax dollars going to Israel’s military. They’re trying to make it very scary to condemn this nightmare, and people are doing it anyway.

MK: Yeah, the power of the people has been, frankly, beautiful, something extremely powerful to behold. And we’ve seen that play out at UNRWA USA, where our donor base was just some 7,000 in early October 2023. We saw our donor base grow 146,000 people since October 2023. And don’t let anybody tell you otherwise, these donors are from every state in the union, every ethnic background. I can’t tell you how many Jewish people donated on Passover in 2023 and 2024, talking about what Passover means, freeing the oppressed from affliction. We have seen, in just that snapshot of support for us, that American people are compassionate and are caring, and it’s really the elites who are trying to tell a different story, and a false story, that, thankfully, many folks in this country are too smart to swallow.

And I’ll just say that I view my work at UNRWA USA of serving the essential humanitarian needs of a population that is under brutal assault, which genocide scholars, including many, many in Israel, are calling a genocide. It is a badge of honor to provide humanitarian aid for a population that is under collective punishment.

And I’ll tell you that I do this, like so many, because “Never Again” is not just never again for the Holocaust, for Jewish people, for my grandfather who escaped Nazi Germany, “Never Again” is for anybody. And so as hard as this moment is, in terms of the repression in this country, I am honored to work beside my colleagues at UNRWA USA, many Palestinians, and beside all of the brave people in this country who refuse to swallow the narrative, the false narrative, that’s being handed to them.

JJ: We’ve been speaking with Mara Kronenfeld of UNRWA USA. Mara Kronenfeld, thank you so much for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

MK: Thank you.

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

Common Dreams (5/14/25)

This week on CounterSpin: On a Sunday night, not when officials do things they’re most proud of, House Republicans passed a plan to give more money to rich people by taking it from the non-rich. Call it what you will, that’s what’s ultimately happening with the plan to cut more than $700 billion from Medicaid in order to “offset,” as elite media have it, the expense of relieving millionaires from contributing to public coffers. Even the feint they’re using—we’re not cutting aid, just forcing recipients to work, like they should—is obvious, age-old and long-disproven, if evidence is what you care about. Thing is, of the millions of people at the sharp end of the plan, most are children, who have no voice corporate media feel obliged to listen to. We’ll nevertheless talk about them with independent journalist Bryce Covert.

Washington Post (5/11/25)

Also on the show: You may have seen an editorial in the Washington Post indicating that, despite what you have heard for years, from trans people and from doctors and medical associations that work with trans people, maybe it’s OK for you to still entertain the notion that, weirdly, on this occasion, it’s not science but talkshow hosts who have it right, and trans kids are just actually mentally ill. We’ll talk about that with journalist and trans rights activist Erin Reed, of Erin in the Morning.

New York Times publisher A.G. Sulzberger (5/13/25) says the press should ask itself, “Were we open-minded enough to unexpected facts?” It’s a good question.

New York Times publisher A.G. Sulzberger delivered an impassioned defense of  press freedom to the Kellogg Institute at the University of Notre Dame, which later ran in the Times (5/13/25). At first glance, Sulzberger is repeating what many free press advocates, including myself (FAIR.org, 11/14/24, 2/26/25, 4/25/25), have said, which is that press freedom is under attack, and it is incumbent upon free society to fight back.

Of course, this is A.G. Sulzberger, who clings to the false god of journalistic neutrality at all costs, so his otherwise hard-hitting critique of Trump’s all-out assault on the press and his emphasis on “upsetting powerful interests of every type” is directly undermined by his insistence that “our job is to cover political debates, not to join them,” and that “we are nobody’s opposition” and “nobody’s cheerleader.” (FAIR dissected Sulzberger’s virtually identical arguments about the role of journalism under Trump back in September—see FAIR.org, 9/6/24.)

But the notion that journalists don’t play favorites is belied by another passage in Sulzberger’s updated manifesto. He wrote:

A record number of journalists have been killed or jailed in recent years. Many more are subjected to campaigns of harassment, intimidation, surveillance and censorship. Those efforts have been perhaps most obvious and intense in authoritarian states like China and Russia. But a more insidious playbook for undermining the press has emerged in places like Hungary and India. Places where democracy persists but in a more conditional way, under leaders who were elected legitimately and then set about undermining checks on their power.

What’s most striking about this description is what it leaves out. The link is to a press release by the Committee to Protect Journalists (1/16/25), titled “The Number of Journalists Jailed Worldwide Reached a Near All-Time High in 2024.” “China, Israel and Myanmar were the leading jailers of reporters, followed by Belarus and Russia,” the release stated.

Committee to Protect Journalists (2/12/25): “The toll of conflict on the press is most glaring in the unprecedented number of journalists and media workers killed in the Israel/Gaza war, 85 in 2024, and 78 in 2023.”

The fact that Israel found itself in a grouping with authoritarian regimes (most of which dwarf it in population, no less) seems like it would be worth a mention, but Sulzberger didn’t agree. He noted the authoritarian turn in India and Hungary—countries that imprisoned three and zero journalists, respectively, according to CPJ—while ignoring Israel, which jailed 43.

Israel is often pitched to Americans as a Western democratic regime in a neighborhood full of backward autocracies. CPJ noted: “A total of 108 journalists were imprisoned in the Middle East and North Africa, almost half of those detained by Israel.” That means Israel’s jailing of journalists significantly overshadows the press repression in places like Egypt (Amnesty International, 7/25/24) and Iran (Reporters Without Borders, 9/11/23), both of which have far bigger populations than Israel.

But Israel’s imprisoning journalists turns out to be the more benign part of its program of suppressing the press. CPJ also released a report (2/12/25) titled “2024 Is Deadliest Year for Journalists in CPJ History; Almost 70% Killed by Israel.” The report said, “At least 124 journalists and media workers were killed last year, nearly two-thirds of them Palestinians killed by Israel.” The group also investigated Israel’s killing of journalists in Lebanon (CPJ, 10/10/24). Altogether, there were 82 journalists killed by Israel in 2024, 13 times as many as were killed in the next-deadliest countries for journalists, Sudan and Pakistan (with six each).

And the world has known about how dire the situation is for the press in this operation from its earliest stages. Less than two months after hostilities began, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace (11/28/23) reported, in a piece called “Israel’s War on Journalists”:

Israel’s assault on Gaza has quickly become the deadliest for journalists covering conflict zones since 1992. No other war in the 21st century has been so lethal for journalists, with 34 killed just within its first two weeks.

I covered this issue for FAIR.org (10/19/23) in the Gaza assault’s early days. But downplaying Israel’s often lethal repression of journalism has been a pattern for the Times generally (FAIR.org, 5/1/24), not just for its publisher.

Sulzberger (Washington Post, 9/5/24) wrote that “my colleagues and I have spent months studying how press freedom has been attacked in Hungary—as well as in other democracies such as India and Brazil.” But not, apparently, in Israel.

As mentioned earlier, this is not the first time Sulzberger has made such an omission. Last year, he wrote a lengthy article in the Washington Post (9/5/24) about the decline of press freedom in Hungary, Brazil and India. He wrote that these countries are run by “would-be strongmen” who “have developed a style” of repression against the media that is “more subtle than their counterparts in totalitarian states such as Russia, China and Saudi Arabia, who systematically censor, jail or kill journalists.”

It was an interesting piece, but again, Israel’s war on the press went unmentioned, even though it is a key example of press freedom decline in a Western state where the government has become more illiberal and authoritarian (NPR, 1/12/23; New Statesman, 1/17/23; Foreign Affairs, 2/8/23).

Press freedom in Israel has been on the decline since the invasion of Gaza began in October 2023. In that time, the government has pushed a boycott of the left-leaning newspaper Haaretz (Guardian, 11/24/24), moved to privatize public broadcasting (Jerusalem Post, 11/24/24) and increased censorship (+972, 5/20/24). The country has banned the broadcaster Al Jazeera (5/6/24). After Sulzberger delivered his address, the Israeli government moved to take even more control over broadcasting (Times of Israel, 5/18/25).

Israel’s killing and jailing of journalists, as well as its domestic clampdown and censorship of the press, is arguably at the center of the global crisis in press freedom. The fact that Sulzberger omitted this undercuts his point, because it reinforces the perception that the Times goes out of its way to bury or sanitize unsavory details about Israel’s treatment of Palestinians (FAIR.org, 5/16/25) and advance Israel’s narrative (Literary Hub, 4/30/24)—calling into question his claim that a free press is essential to “arm everyone else with the information and context they need to understand and meet the moment.”

ACTION ALERT: You can send a message to the New York Times at [email protected] or via Bluesky: @NYTimes.com. Please remember that respectful communication is the most effective. Feel free to leave a copy of your message in the comments thread here.

FEATURED IMAGE: The Committee to Project Journalists’ image of a van from the Al-Quds Al-Youm TV channel that was hit by an Israeli air strike in Gaza in December 2024, killing four journalists and a media worker. (Photo: Reuters/Khamis Said)

The World Health Organization (5/12/25) “calls for the protection of health care and for an immediate end to the aid blockade, which is starving people, obstructing their right to health, and robbing them of dignity and hope.”

More than two months ago, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced a complete blockade of aid—including food, water and medical supplies—from entering the besieged Gaza strip. It’s a severe escalation of Israel’s now 19-month genocide against Palestinians in Gaza—and what the World Health Organization (5/12/25) has described as “one of the world’s worst hunger crises, unfolding in real time.”

With no replenishing stock, aid groups have begun running out of supplies to distribute to families in need.

The UN Relief and Works Agency (5/16/25) reports that their “flour and food parcels have run out,” and that “one third of essential medical supplies are already out of stock.” More than a week ago, World Central Kitchen reported that they no longer have supplies to cook hot meals and bake bread for starving families—they’ve since repurposed their pots to distribute filtered water.

With Gaza’s entire population experiencing crisis-level food insecurity, and with three-quarters facing “emergency” or “catastrophic” levels of deprivation, the famine has been recognized by Human Rights Watch interim executive director Federico Borello as “a tool of extermination.”

The New York Times‘ online headline (4/28/25) reduces the prospect of mass starvation to the innocuous phrase “Gaza aid.”

At first glance, the April 29 New York Times offered what many would call an objective account with the headline: “UN Faults Israel Over Blockade of Aid for Gaza” (web version here: 4/28/25).

A closer look at the piece however, reveals the Times’ usual spinelessness in its Gaza coverage, unquestioningly accepting Israeli framing in its supposed right to carry out its ongoing genocide.

Reporter Aaron Boxerman writes up top:

For more than a month and a half, Israel has blocked food, medicine and other relief from entering the devastated Gaza Strip in an attempt to pressure Hamas to free the dozens of remaining Israeli hostages there. It argues that its blockade is lawful and that Gaza has enough provisions despite the restrictions.

That frame looks like a simple sentence, but note that it tacitly requires you to accept that Israel determines whether people in the Gaza Strip can receive the basics for human life—asking why Israel is in charge of Palestinians’ food and medicine is beyond this conversation’s walls.

Then, without even a comma, we are told that the denial of life to all Gazans is “an attempt to pressure Hamas”—Boxerman makes a silent skip over the acceptability of collective punishment there, and a frictionless transmission of Israel’s rationale for its actions. That Israel has itself deprioritized the release of the hostages vis-à-vis the reoccupation of Gaza is off the page. But that Israel “argues” the blockade is lawful and that Gaza has what we’re told to accept as “enough provisions”? Those are statements that the Times suggests can stand alone.

The New York Times (4/28/25) describes the relationship between Israel, which has announced a policy of starving millions of people, and the UN, which is trying to force Israel to allow food aid into Gaza, as “fraught with mutual recrimination.”

But aha, you say, here comes another view—though it’s already set up by being in the responsive, “others differ” position:

The United Nations and aid groups say the blockade has further harmed Palestinians already reeling from more than a year and a half of war in Gaza, which has killed tens of thousands of people, displaced well over a million and leveled large swaths of the enclave’s cities.

While true, and ostensibly sympathetic, what with the reeling and the leveling, notice how this is not a direct response to the claims in the lead: that the blockade is lawful, and that Gaza has all it needs. It’s just a statement that the people of Gaza have suffered tremendously. And that even that is just a thing the UN and aid groups “say.”

You could tighten this all to the NBC News headline (4/17/25) Belén Fernández clocked in her piece on coverage of Israel’s starvation of Gaza (FAIR.org, 4/25/25): “Aid Groups Describe Dire Conditions in Gaza as Israel Says There Is No Shortage of Aid.”

All of this depends on who you choose to believe, seems to be elite media’s message—with a few winky-wink tips on who to believe.

Boxerman goes on to report:

Ordinary Gazans have lamented the rising price of basic commodities under the pressure of the blockade. In some cases, the restrictions have turned the quest for getting enough nutritious food into a daily struggle.

It’s like an unfunny game of “find the qualifier”: What’s an “ordinary” Gazan, and who are the extraordinary ones who deserve to starve? What defines the “some cases”?  Is un-nutritious food freely available? When does a “quest” become a “struggle”?

It’s a perverse way to describe a situation where widespread starvation is not looming or imminent, but well underway. But it’s an excellent way to tell people they don’t necessarily, if you look at it a certain way, need to give a damn.

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Research assistance: Wilson Korik

Janine Jackson interviewed the Center for Biological Diversity’s Ashley Nunes about the selloff of public lands for the May 9, 2025, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

Common Dreams (4/22/25)

Janine Jackson: 

From lease sales to expedited permitting processes, the committee’s proposal creates an unprecedented pathway for developing our vast natural resources on federal lands and waters for generations to come.

That’s a response to a piece of the budget reconciliation bill making its way through Congress, and it comes from the American Petroleum Institute. So you can sense what’s up, and why our guest calls this piece of Republicans’ effort to fund Trump’s tax cuts for billionaires nothing more than opportunities for industry to plunder, profit and pollute.

Ashley Nunes is a specialist in public lands policy at the Center for Biological Diversity. She joins us now by phone. Welcome to CounterSpin, Ashley Nunes.

Ashley Nunes: Thank you, Janine. Good to be with you.

Outdoor Alliance (5/6/25)

JJ: Let’s timestamp ourselves. We’re recording on May 8, and this is about the House Natural Resources Committee, and their contribution to the Republican House Reconciliation Bill, that’s going to tell us how to offset the billionaire tax cuts that they want to push through. But it’s not a done deal yet, right?

AN: Right.

JJ: So it’s still in process. There are lots of implications, but what would this plan do, particularly with regard to–I could say public lands, but I really appreciate your phrase, “precious wild places.” What would this do?

AN: So as someone who’s focused on public lands policy, I am most interested in the part of the reconciliation package that’s come out of the House Natural Resources Committee. The proposed Republican budget hands over power to private industries to destroy our public lands and offshore waters. The excessive and indiscriminate development of fossil fuels, minerals and timber will harm wildlife and communities. This reckless development would undermine environmental protections. It would simply make air and water quality worse. And, of course, that’s harmful for wildlife and communities. So this budget wouldn’t just give tax breaks to billionaires, but it would give polluters the green light to raise emissions, destroy wild places and harm endangered species.

JJ: In particular, I know that you look at, for example, Alaska. We’re looking at oil leases in Alaska, we’re looking at Minnesota. There are very specific things, and I wonder if you could just lift up some examples for folks to know what we’re talking about.

AN: Absolutely. This is not an exhaustive list by any means, but I think I could do some highlights industry by industry.

JJ: Please.

NRDC (4/4/25)

AN: So let’s start with oil and gas on public lands. This bill would mandate dozens of lease sales every quarter, as you say, also sometimes in very sensitive locations, like the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. There’s also at least 4 million acres on the coastal plains of Alaska for oil and gas, some of the most important bird breeding areas in the country, and really one of the last great wild places, not only in the Arctic, but in the world.

Then if we go to offshore waters for oil and gas, this bill would mandate six lease sales in Alaska’s Cook Inlet, and at least 30 lease sales in Gulf waters over the next 15 years. This offshore oil and gas development, when it pushes into sensitive ecosystems and deeper waters, it really risks another tragedy like the 2010 Deepwater Horizon explosion and oil spill that resulted in loss of human life and non-human life. The Gulf waters are home to the Rice’s whale, the world’s most endangered whale. So oil and gas here is really doing the most.

The other fossil fuel we’re mentioning is coal. This bill would open at least 4 million acres for new coal leasing. Coal is a dying and downright dirty industry, but this bill would have taxpayers subsidizing to keep that industry alive.

So across the board, there’s reduced royalty payments for these fossil fuel companies, for oil, gas and coal. And even though Republicans say that this is a bill intended to raise revenue, polluters get a really good deal here.

New York Times (4/19/24)

So that’s just fossil fuels. And if I could say a bit more, as you said, there’s also mining and timber. These are other extractive industries in the bill. So, mining: The bill undoes protections put in place by the Biden administration, it pushes through contentious mining projects, one of which you mentioned. So reversing a ban on 225,000 acres adjacent to Boundary Waters Wilderness in Minnesota, and then also a ban on a 211-mile mining road that would stretch across unspoiled wilderness in Alaska.

And then for timber, there’s a mandated 25% increase in timber production on public lands. And I fear this puts a target on the biggest and oldest trees, because of their economic value for timber. A bigger tree would produce more timber, but these are also the most ecologically valuable trees for carbon sequestration, habitat protection and wildfire resilience. So this is a huge giveaway to extractive industry that would be hugely harmful for the places we love.

JJ: And maybe to just pull it out a bit, this is opposing what communities want to do with their land, right? Land use is a local issue, and we hear hollering about states’ rights, but this is actually in opposition to what a number of places have said they want to do with their land.

AN: That’s right, Janine, and this is wonky, but there are many provisions, across the bill, that would take away environmental review. And that’s the process that allows the public to have their say, to give their input. So if Congress rubberstamps projects, the public doesn’t have that opportunity.

JJ: It’s so important. The fight to resist clean energy in this country is intense, and it’s also transparent. And those thumbprints are all over this as well. The fossil fuel companies, they’re following tobacco. They’re just going to hold onto it, to the very last penny. And that seems evident in this legislation.

AN: You’re so right. There are provisions, as I said, to reduce royalties on fossil fuels, and that’s the status quo. But there’s also provisions to add rents for clean energy, renewable energy on public lands. So this is really a giveaway to polluters, and it’s to the detriment of that clean energy transition that we need.

JJ: I’ll just ask you, finally: I think transparency is the least that reporters could demand from this process, that has such myriad implications. But what would you like to see from journalism on this set of issues? And maybe what would you like to see less of?

Ashley Nunes: “This budget proposal is one of the worst attacks on the environment that we have seen in our lifetime.”

AN: There’s just so much to say here, really. I think I would just say a couple of things.

First of all, we were warned that this would happen. This budget bill is the Project 2025 and Agenda 47 playbooks in action. It’s not just “drill, baby, drill,” it’s also “mine, baby, mine” and “log, baby, log.” This proposal uses public resources to enrich private interests. It’s extreme. And if these provisions stay in the reconciliation package, and are enacted, this would be an obscene giveaway of our public resources to private industry, and it would put these places at serious risk. It’s heartbreaking. I think journalists, like you and others, can help people understand what’s at stake.

So, secondly, I would just add that we are living through a climate crisis and an extinction crisis, and this budget proposal is one of the worst attacks on the environment that we have seen in our lifetime. It would not only cause harm to our cherished landscapes, coastal waters and wildlife, but also to our public health, and our ability to recreate on our public lands across the country. So people want to know what they can do, and ultimately, people need to call their congressional representatives and tell them to vote no, to stop.

JJ: We’ve been speaking with Ashley Nunes, public lands policy specialist at the Center for Biological Diversity. They’re online at BiologicalDiversity.org. Thank you so much, Ashley Nunes, for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

AN: Thanks, Janine.

It seems like an odd moment for the US media to do a hit job on Brazil’s coffee industry.

Protective tariffs have been used since the 1800s in the US to protect domestic industry and increase employment. As Raúl Prebisch, Celso Furtado and other economists influential on Latin America’s “Pink Tide” argued, tariffs are also fundamental for Global South nations to escape from the prison of agricultural commodity export dependence, by enabling them to industrialize through import substitution.

Regardless of heterodox economists’ arguments in favor of import tariffs, however, there seems to be little sense in the US government imposing tariffs on products that can never be produced nationally, like bananas or coffee. This is what it did on April 2—the day after April Fool’s day—when President Trump announced new, blanket tariffs on all imports from 57 countries around the world.

Compared to other countries (like Cambodia or Madagascar) in the Global South, Brazil, which had a trade deficit with the United States in 2024, got off relatively easy, with 10%. One sector that will hurt, however, is coffee.

Brazil is the largest coffee producer in the world, and its largest export market is the United States. Brazil exported $1.8 billion, or 15% of its total coffee production, to the United States in 2024. In 2025, US consumers will have to foot the bill for a 10% tariff on a product whose price has already increased by 6.9% this year, due to the effects of climate change weather events on last year’s harvest cycle.

AP (4/24/25): “Eight Brazilian coffee workers…allege… they were put in filthy housing and the cost of their transportation, food and equipment was deducted from their pay.”

The US’s new tariffs on Brazil came into effect on April 5. Nineteen days later, a Delaware-based NGO named Coffee Watch, which provides no funding transparency on its website, conducted a media blitz against Brazil’s coffee industry. It issued a letter to the US Customs and Border Protection, demanding a halt on all Brazilian coffee imports to the United States. On April 24, the New York Times, Guardian and AP, which sells content to hundreds of sites and newspapers, ran simultaneous articles on Coffee Watch’s campaign.

Coffee Watch built on the stories of eight workers rescued by Brazilian federal labor inspectors from what the Brazil’s government called “slave-like conditions.” These workers came from five of Brazil’s 330,000 coffee farms. Coffee Watch and other quoted experts extrapolated from their cases to advocate for a complete halt of Brazilian coffee exports to the United States—itself a country where hundreds of thousands of undocumented immigrants work on farms under conditions that could be categorized as “slave-like” within Brazil’s legal framework.

The New York Times article (4/24/25), headlined “Forced Labor Taints Brazilian Coffee, Say Complaints to US Authorities,” detailed a lawsuit filed against Northern companies, including Starbucks, Nestlé and Dunkin’, on behalf of eight workers from five of the 19,000 farms affiliated with the Cooxupé cooperative. The article, by the Times‘ Ephrat Livni, went on to describe Coffee Watch’s efforts to force the US Customs and Border Protection to block all coffee entering from Brazil.

“This isn’t about a few bad actors,” the Times quoted Etelle Higonnet, the founder and director of Coffee Watch. “We’re exposing an entrenched system that traps millions in extreme poverty and thousands in outright slavery.”

The subheading of the Guardian article (4/24/25) read, “Brazil has been the world’s leading coffee producer due to the forced labor of enslaved Africans and Afro-Brazilians.”

AP (4/24/25) quoted International Rights Advocates founder Terry Collingsworth, who is representing the plaintiffs, saying, “Consumers are paying obscene amounts for a cup of Starbucks coffee that was harvested by trafficked slaves.”

New York Times (4/24/25): “The laborers end up…harvesting coffee under conditions not so different from those of their enslaved forebears.”

From reporting like this, the casual reader might think that Brazil’s coffee industry is based on slave labor, and that many or most of the people who work picking coffee are enslaved. This is a greatly misleading depiction of the very real labor issues in Brazil.

Although landless agricultural workers in Brazil, like nearly everywhere else in the world, suffer from low wages, lack of job stability and oppressive labor conditions, Brazil’s coffee farm workers have significantly better labor rights than farm workers in the United States. Nearly half of the US farm workforce are undocumented immigrants with no labor rights whatsoever, in fear of being arrested, imprisoned and/or deported by ICE.

The arguments advanced to justify banning coffee imports from Brazil to the US rely on outliers representing a tiny portion of the workforce, not the norm, as these sensational articles present.

Brazil’s coffee industry provides 580,000 full time jobs and millions of harvest-season temp jobs. According to Coffee Watch’s own letter, the highest number of workers rescued from “slave-like conditions” in any year since 2003 was 333, in 2023.

When Higonnet tells the Times that “thousands” of coffee workers in Brazil work in “outright slavery” (a more than semantic leap from the Brazilian legal category of “slave-like” working conditions), she is misleadingly referring to Coffee Watch’s composite figure of 4,128, cited in Coffee Watch’s letter to Customs as the total number of coffee workers rescued from “slave-like” conditions between 2003 and 2024.

Whereas the number of 221 workers rescued from slave-like conditions in 2024 certainly doesn’t represent the total number of workers subjected to those conditions that year, no methodology is presented to estimate what that undercount might be. The number of Brazil’s federal labor inspectors is 2,800, including 900 new hires this year, and the number estimated by IPEA needed to bring Brazil up to international standards is 3,700, so an undercount is a clear possibility, but it’s certainly a far cry from Collingsworth’s insinuation that most Starbucks coffee purchased from Brazil was produced by “trafficked slaves.”

Guardian (4/24/25): “Starbucks charges like $6 for a cup of coffee, where most of that has been harvested by forced laborers and child laborers.”

Like the United States and most other countries in the Americas, Brazil was built on the back of slave labor, and was the last country to eradicate it, in 1888. The legacy of this today is that it has the highest Afro-descendent population outside of Africa, and huge problems of structural racism, including large but shrinking levels of inequality, and lack of opportunities for the poorest segments of society, which are disproportionately constituted of the 56% of the nation’s population that is Afro-Brazilian.

There is a large population of landless rural workers, who with support from the Landless Workers’ Movement (MST in Portuguese) and the National Confederation of Agricultural Workers (CONTAG) have been successfully fighting for land rights since the end of the US-backed military dictatorship in 1985. Today, although millions of landless rural workers toil away in degrading conditions for low wages on farms producing export commodity crops like coffee, sugar and soy—some of which cross the line into violating Brazil’s slave-labor legislation—there is also a growing population of millions of family farmers who don’t employ anyone.

Today, 78% of Brazil’s 330,000 coffee farms, producing around 48% of the total amount of coffee, are small-holder family farms. If Coffee Watch succeeds in lobbying the US government to halt imports from Brazil, the hardest-hit sector will be the same group that fair trade advocates work to empower. Without millions ferreted away in investment funds and offshore holdings, it’s the family farms that run the risk of financial ruin, not the agribusiness plantations, or companies like Starbucks and Nestlé that work with them. When small farmers lose their livelihood, they often become rural workers themselves, which, as Coffee Watch’s own letter to Border Patrol demonstrates, are among the lowest-paid and most vulnerable labor sectors in Brazil.

Based on the actions of five farms that belong to a cooperative of 19,000 of them, Coffee Watch and the media organizations supporting its campaign are targeting an industry largely composed of family farmers. It’s reminiscent of Operation Car Wash, an “anti-corruption” campaign backed by the US DoJ that bankrupted Brazil’s five largest construction and engineering companies, and caused 4.4 million direct and indirect job losses, under the guise of punishing a handful of corrupt business executives.

Just as was the case with corruption in the construction industry, the directors of the farms, the cooperative and the US corporations they sell to deserve to be held liable for their labor crimes. But punishing the industry as a whole will cause disproportionate suffering for the working class and poor, and raise Brazil’s level of extreme poverty.

Coffee Watch’s letter to acting Customs Commissioner Pete R. Flores cited US and International Labor Organization (ILO) legislation on slave labor used to justify the demand to block coffee imports from Brazil, but uses the Brazilian federal government’s much wider definition of “slave-like” labor conditions for the facts and figures used to back its argument.

Brazil, a nation with a long history of slavery and oppressive labor conditions in rural areas, first recognized modern slavery as a problem in 1995, and widened its definition of “slave-like” labor in 2003 under President Lula da Silva. It created a series of enforcement mechanisms to hold companies accountable for violating labor laws, including a “dirty list” of companies convicted of using slave labor. These employers are required to pay a minimum of 20 months salary at minimum wage to each rescued worker, as well as court fines, and can face up to eight years in prison.

Companies stay on the dirty list for two years and, during this time, are blocked from receiving government contracts or credit. Among the best-known companies that have appeared on the list is FEMSA, the world’s largest bottler of Coca-Cola. FEMSA was put on the list in 2018 after labor inspectors discovered truckers and warehouse workers at one of its Brazilian plants were being forced to work between 80 and 140 hours of overtime per month.

This was one of many cases in which “slave-like” working conditions, although oppressive and illegal, did not mean they were being held captive or forced to work for no remuneration. Brazil’s definition of slave-like working conditions has some overlap with US and ILO law, for example, holding workers in captivity and forcing them to work for very low or no wages. But it also includes things that are legal in the US, even for those US agricultural workers who are not undocumented, let alone the US’s 800,000 prison slave laborers.

As Brazil’s National Justice Council explains, the 2003 change in Brazil’s definition of slave labor represents

significant progress in the fight against this social problem, because it goes beyond lack of freedom, expanding the criminal definition of slavery to include cases of subjection to degrading working conditions, exhaustive work hours or debt bondage.

Coffee Watch’s own letter to Flores states:

The Brazilian approach to forced labor is somewhat more expansive than the ILO’s, as it may allow for prosecution of employers who subject workers to extremely degrading conditions, regardless of whether coercion was present in the employment relationship.

Any single violation of Brazil’s different criteria for slave-like working conditions makes the employer liable. This can include things like excessively long work days, not having an adequate number of bathrooms for the number of workers, making workers rent gloves and other safety equipment from the employer, not compensating workers for transportation to and from the work site, and not providing an adequate amount of drinking water. It would be easy enough for an organization such as Coffee Watch to verify this, but it’s a fair assumption to make that at least some of the coffee workers rescued from slave-like conditions since 2003 were victims of oppressive labor conditions that would not constitute slave labor by ILO or US legal criteria.

This is in no way meant to minimize the oppression of those rural workers in Brazil’s coffee trade who are working in what Brazil’s government calls slave-like conditions. With over 1 million people employed in the sector, however, their situation is an outlier. Much more troublesome are the low wages and lousy working conditions that represent the norm in the industry—especially the fact that most temporary harvest laborers work off the books, outside of many of the safeguards in place to protect worker rights.

Another problem is the low number of labor inspectors—the result of six years of gutting of the Labor Ministry by neoliberal presidents Michel Temer and Jair Bolsonaro, who, thanks to a constitutional amendment passed in 2017, left the government with neoliberal spending caps. These were only partially dismantled by a compromise amendment called the New Fiscal Framework, enacted as Lula returned to power in 2023.

Capping social spending increases at 2.5% per year above inflation may have led to the compromise of only hiring 900 of the 1,800 inspectors needed to bring Brazil up to international labor standards, but the fact remains that Brazil has not reached the goal of one inspector for 10,000–15,000 workers recommended by the International Labor Organization.

Around the world, landless rural laborers are among the most oppressed, poorest members of the labor force. Nevertheless, Brazilian coffee farms are not regularly raided by masked government police and their workers thrown into prison camps. In this political juncture, US institutions have little moral standing to criticize labor rights for agricultural workers in other countries—especially in countries like Brazil, whose labor rights issues stem in part from the US-backed military dictatorship’s systematic campaign of arrest, torture and murder of labor union leaders.

The idea that Trump’s US Customs and Border Protection would act to increase the price of coffee right now, in the name of “human rights,” based on abuses in five coffee farms, is very unlikely. This exposes the move as a publicity stunt, clearly designed to boost fundraising and legitimacy for a new NGO.

If Coffee Watch were focused more on improving the lives of coffee workers than on institutional promotion, it could show solidarity by supporting the MST and CONTAG in their fight to help landless agricultural workers start their own farms.

Taking big corporations like Starbucks and Nestlé to task for failing to obey local labor laws is commendable. But given the long history of US NGOs acting as regime change cheerleaders for the US State Department in Latin America, the priority that many of these organizations place on self-advancement over benefiting their target populations, and the long, cushy relationship between sleazy corporations like ExxonMobil and NGOs like Transparency International USA, can human rights guidelines for the Global South established by a US organization with no funding transparency really be trusted?

You would think a publication like the New York Times would exercise enough due diligence to include the voice of, say, someone from Brazil’s DA office, or an official from an agency that works to monitor, punish and prevent occurrences of slave-like working conditions. Instead, it published a slightly modified press release from Coffee Watch, and the journalists involved probably thought they were doing their good deed for the month.

Featured image: Cachoeirinha farm in Nova Resende, Brazil, on the government’s “dirty list” for labor abuses (photo: Ministry of Labor and Employment).

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Reuters (5/2/25)

This week on CounterSpin: As part of its deadly denial of food, water and medicine to Palestinian people, Israel attacked a civilian aid ship endeavoring to bring humanitarian aid to Gaza, setting it on fire, injuring crewmembers, cutting off communications. The ship was called the Conscience. Millions around the world ask every day what it will take to awaken the conscience of leaders to stop the genocide of Palestinians, instead of trying to silence the outcry.

Corporate media are complicit, with please-don’t-think-about-it headlines like NBC News‘ “Aid Groups Describe Dire Conditions in Gaza as Israel Says There Is No Shortage of Aid.”

We talk about attacks on aid delivery and media’s role with Mara Kronenfeld, executive director at UNRWA USA (UNRWA being the UN Relief & Works Agency for Palestine Refugees, UNRWA USA being the partner group amplifying and grounding that work).

Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at press coverage of Gaza’s starvation and the MOVE bombing.