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As the Washington Post faces a staff rebellion and plummeting subscription rates, billionaire owner Jeff Bezos has introduced a new mission statement: “Riveting Storytelling for All of America.”

The Washington Post‘s new slogan, “Riveting Storytelling for All of America,” is “meant to be an internal rallying point for employees,” the New York Times (1/16/25) reported.

The new path forward, as introduced in a slide deck to staff by Suzi Watford, the paper’s chief strategy officer, demands that the paper “understand and represent interests across the country,” and “provide a forum for viewpoints, expert perspectives and conversation” (New York Times, 1/16/25). It will do this as “an AI-fueled platform for news” that delivers “vital news, ideas and insights for all Americans where, how and when they want it.”

This appears to mean shifting resources toward opinion, specifically opinions from the right. According to the New York Times report:

Bezos has expressed hopes that the Post would be read by more blue-collar Americans who live outside coastal cities, mentioning people like firefighters in Cleveland. He has also said that he is interested in expanding the Post’s audience among conservatives.

The Post has already begun to consider ways to sharply increase the amount of opinion commentary published on its website, according to two people with knowledge of the talks. An adviser to the Post, Lippe Oosterhof, has conducted brainstorming sessions about a new initiative that would make it easier to receive and publish opinion writing from outside contributors.

How AI is meant to play into this is unclear.

The Post already has more columnists than you can shake a stick at. This new direction sounds like the Foxification of the Washington Post, a move away from any attempt to hold the powerful to account, toward inexpensive clickbait punditry.

‘Make money’

The red area represents the proportion of Jeff Bezos’s total wealth that would be required to cover the Washington Post‘s losses for a year.

Watford’s slide deck presented three pillars of the Post‘s new model: “great journalism,” “happy customers” and “make money.” The Post lost roughly $77 million in 2023. (It also lost some 250,000 subscribers after Bezos killed the paper’s planned endorsement of Kamala Harris—FAIR.org, 10/30/24.)

In order to make money, its new “Big Hairy Audacious Goal” (yes, that’s what the Post slide deck apparently called it) is to reach 200 million “paying users.” The paper currently has about 3 million subscribers, making it an “audacious” goal indeed. As the Times pointed out, even if the Post could achieve the impossible task of monetizing every visit to its website, no major corporate media outlet has been getting more than 100 million monthly unique visits—paying and non-paying—outside of the spike in traffic around the election.

Back in 2019, the Post was claiming 80–90 million unique visitors per month. Those visits peaked in November 2020 at 114 million, but quickly and steadily dropped after Biden’s inauguration. The Post stopped posting its audience numbers online after January 2023, when they were down to 58 million.

Of course, most online corporate media have been struggling. The thing about the Post is that its absurdly wealthy owner, the second-richest person on Earth, can easily afford to lose $77 million a year. That’s 0.03% of Bezos’s current net worth.

‘We are deeply alarmed’

Guardian (1/15/25): “The plea from staff…comes a week after the Post laid off roughly 100 employees…roughly 4% of the publication’s staff.”

No doubt the Post needs help. Just days before the new mission statement was revealed, over 400 staff members signed a letter to Bezos asking for a meeting (Guardian, 1/15/25).  The letter read:

We are deeply alarmed by recent leadership decisions that have led readers to question the integrity of this institution, broken with a tradition of transparency, and prompted some of our most distinguished colleagues to leave, with more departures imminent.

Bezos’s response—a slide deck about “riveting storytelling” on “an AI-driven platform” that prioritizes churning out opinions to draw in conservatives—is hardly likely to ease the mind of any serious journalist at the paper.

Nor is trying to “expand the Post audience among conservatives,” while still paying lip service to “great journalism,” likely to solve the Post‘s problems. As CNN‘s former CEO Chris Licht discovered (FAIR.org, 6/8/23), you can’t do good journalism while trying to appeal to both sides in the context of an increasingly radical right, because that side demands acceptance of lies and conspiracy theories that are incompatible with actual journalism.

When Bezos bought the Post (Extra!, 3/14), he assured the paper’s employees that “the paper’s duty will remain to its readers and not to the private interests of its owners.” That sentiment was repeated in Watford’s slide deck this week. But Bezos’s actions in the past months—including the killing of the Harris endorsement, Amazon donating $1 million donation to Trump’s inaugural fund and paying Melania Trump $40 million for her self-produced documentary, and, most recently, Bezos appearing onstage with other multibillionaires at Trump’s inauguration—make clear that the principle is as meaningless to Bezos as the slogan that debuted after Trump’s first election: “Democracy Dies in Darkness.”

That slogan will continue to adorn the front page for the time being, perhaps in the hope that readers searching for an actual news organization that holds those in power to account will be fooled into subscribing.

ACTION ALERT: You can send a message to the Washington Post at letters@washpost.com.

Please remember that respectful communication is the most effective. Feel free to leave a copy of your message in the comments thread here.

 

Ten months before the 2024 election, high-profile news outlets were already sounding the alarm: If Trump were to win another term, widespread fatigue, despair and activist burnout would probably minimize resistance.

Exhaustion and burnout are real phenomena that pose a significant challenge to political movements (Psychology Today, 6/24/20). But articles that focus on feelings of burnout, and exclude or downplay questions of changes in strategy amid shifting conditions, often have the effect—and occasionally the goal—of making everyday people seem and feel less powerful than they are.

A year ago, Politico‘s Michael Schaffer (1/26/24) was predicting that a Trump victory might “be met with avoidance, listlessness and apathy.”

Politico writer Michael Schaffer (1/26/24) noted a year ago that the shock of Trump’s 2016 victory “sparked a burst of activity that profoundly altered Washington”:

Donations to progressive advocacy groups soared. Traffic to political media spiked. Protests filled the calendar…. But now, as a second Trump term becomes an increasingly real possibility, there’s no consensus that anything similar would happen in January 2025.

While acknowledging that the post-2016 burst of activity had profoundly altered Washington, Politico warned Trump opponents that pioneering new strategies would only get them so far, since passivity in the face of a second Trump term “has as much to do with psychology as it does with the tactics or organizational skill of the activist class.”

Humans “respond to a sudden threat with a fight-or-flight instinct,” Schaffer observed, and for many, “the string of jolts that accompanied the first Trump months of 2017—the Muslim ban, the firing of James Comey, Charlottesville—spurred an impulse to fight.” The same was unlikely to be true of a second Trump win, he speculated, because for many it would amount to proof that fighting back “wasn’t enough,” and could “just as easily be met with avoidance, listlessness and apathy.”

Good journalists don’t pretend an energetic and cohesive resistance exists when it does not. But presenting opposition to authoritarians like Trump as pointless, ineffectual and doomed is journalistically irresponsible and historically illiterate, particularly when it’s clear that the initial backlash to Trump had an effect (New York Times, 12/18/17).

‘A weary shrug’

After the election, Politico again predicted a muted response to Trump’s second term. A Politico EU story (11/13/24) characterized the 2024 Trump resistance as “flaccid” (“Toto, we’re not in 2016 anymore,” read the subhead), and proclaimed that while Trump’s 2016 win had “sparked a global revolt,” his recent triumph has been “met with a weary shrug.”

The outlet suggested that Trump’s latest win had been inevitable—

part of a broader, inexorable rightward trend on both sides of the Atlantic, leaving a dejected liberal left to helplessly scratch their heads as the fickle tide of political history turns against them.

Which might leave anti-Trump readers wondering: Don’t humans have a role to play in turning history’s tide?

After the election, Politico‘s Schaffer (11/15/24) presented the exodus from the far-right X (formerly Twitter) as a sign that “the post-election progressive ferment that in 2016 gave us the resistance is going to be a lot quieter this time.”

A couple of days later, Schaffer (Politico, 11/15/24) wrote a column headlined “The Resistance Is Not Coming to Save You. It’s Tuning Out.” Noting a decline in critical coverage of Trump, Schaffer wrote that for a nation

wondering whether the return of Trump will drive an immediate return of the public fury and journalistic energy triggered by his first win, it makes for an early hint that the answer will be: Nope.

Where Trump’s first victory “triggered Blue America’s fight instinct,” he added, “the aftermath of this year’s win is looking a lot more like flight.” The question of why so many Americans are now in “fight or flight” mode went largely unexamined. Schaffer’s main takeaway was that Blue America cannot credibly blame a “feckless pre-election press” for “bungl[ing] the coverage” of the race this time around, as if alarmist corporate media coverage of crime, immigration, the economy and transgender issues didn’t contribute to Trump’s narrow victory in 2024.

He also faulted the initial resistance to Trump for being “organized around issues of identity,” citing as examples the 2017 Women’s March, the backlash to the Muslim ban, the 2017 counter-protest against a white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, and the 2020 racial justice protests. But the fact that the Women’s March drew people of all genders, most participants in the 2020 racial justice protests were white, and Black Lives Matter may have been the largest protest movement in US history suggests that many Americans find issues of “identity” galvanizing rather than alienating.

And it is likelier that direct threats to people’s lives—say, those posed by mass deportations and abortion bans—will inspire more re-engagement than vague appeals to issues like preserving democracy.

Reformulated opposition

Truthout (11/16/24): “As we step out of our grieving and look ahead, there are reasons to believe that a new social movement cycle to confront Trumpism can emerge.”

It’s true that while Trump’s 2016 victory came as a horrific shock to millions, in part because Hillary Clinton was widely expected to win, the outcome of the 2024 election was less surprising, since no candidate seemed assured of victory. But torpor is just one aspect of an unfolding story; opposition to Trump’s agenda is not muted so much as it is being reformulated in response to changing conditions.

Thousands continue to protest Israel’s ongoing genocide, despite elite media outlets’ and universities’ war on free speech and student protesters. Two days after the 2024 election, more than 100,000 people joined a call organized by a coalition of 200 progressive groups, including the Working Families Party, Indivisible, United We Dream and Movement for Black Lives Action, and thousands signed up for follow-up actions.

As it did in and after 2016, Trump’s recent election has spurred thousands to join organizations like the Democratic Socialists of America, to which I belong. Public support for organized labor remains extremely high—70% of Americans approve of labor unions—and the US continues to experience an uptick in militant labor actions, including recent strikes at major companies like Starbucks and Amazon. Finally, many organizers are focused on developing strategies to combat Trump policies, like mass deportations, as soon as he attempts to impose them.

‘Get somebody else to do it’

“How Powerful Leaders Crush Dissent, Demobilizing Millions,” might have been a more appropriate headline for this New York Times piece (11/20/24).

The New York Times has also been obsessed with the allegedly neutered 2024 resistance. “In 2017, [anti-Trump voters] donned pink hats to march on Washington, registering their fury with Donald J. Trump by the hundreds of thousands,” reporter Katie Glueck (2/19/24) wrote, adding, “This year, [they] are grappling with another powerful sentiment: exhaustion.”

Weeks after the election, the paper published “‘Get Somebody Else to Do It’: Trump Resistance Encounters Fatigue” (11/20/24). The subhead read, “Donald J. Trump’s grass-roots opponents search for a new playbook as they reckon with how little they accomplished during his first term.”

In the piece itself, reporter Katie Benner offered a balance of voices of both the exhausted and the motivated, accompanied by a fairly nuanced assessment of the situation facing the anti-Trump resistance, describing “a sharp global reversal in the power of mass action” that may be partly due to governments’ authoritarian drift and declining willingness to change course in response to public pressure. But the paper’s headline writers erased that nuance and the role of repression, leaving only a sense that activists are personally failing. As headlines go, “How Powerful Leaders Crush Dissent, Demobilizing Millions” might have been more accurate.

In December, New York Times columnist and Trump critic Charles Blow (12/18/24) offered weary progressives absolution: “Temporarily Disconnected From Politics? Feel No Guilt About It.” Though he cautioned that it would be “a mistake for anyone to confuse a temporary disconnection for a permanent acquiescence,” he suggested that there were, at the moment, few ways to fight back.

After all, Blow wrote, “there is very little that average citizens can do about the way the administration takes shape”—seeming to forget that cabinet members must be confirmed by the Senate, which is an elected representative body. Even efforts to counter Trump’s agenda led by groups like the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), he noted, are “largely beyond the involvement of average citizens.” (That would probably be news to the ACLU, which is often seeking volunteers, and always seeking donations.)

Even columnists like Blow, who has called Trump an “aberration and abomination,” are apparently more interested in chronicling progressive fatigue than in contending with two troubling shifts noted by the New York Times: a global decline in the power of mass action, and self-proclaimed champion of democracy President Joe Biden’s refusal to respond to the majority of Americans who oppose Israel’s war.

When large groups of Americans cannot sway their leaders via forceful dissent, mass action or electoral campaigns—when participating in politics feels, and often is, useless—some degree of disengagement is inevitable.

‘In no mood to organize’

The Washington Post (11/10/24) presented the mood of today’s activists: “I’m feeling like I want to curl up in the fetal position.”

The Washington Post (11/10/24), under the headline, “A ‘Resistance’ Raced to Fight Trump’s First Term. Will It Rise Again?” noted in its subhead that some who had been a part of that resistance were “exhausted and feeling hopeless,” and “say they need a break.” The piece described an activist, who’d been “shocked into action” by Trump’s 2016 victory, as “in no mood to organize” in 2024. Although many had been “jolted” into opposing Trump in 2016, today’s resistance leaders “must contend with a swirl of other feelings: exhaustion, dejection, burnout.”

Yet despite their exhaustion, ordinary people around the country and world are still organizing, because they know how much worse things can get if they don’t—and because it’s their bodies, families and communities on the line. Having seen how hard it is to make change, even when a policy or cause has majority popular support, it’s no wonder that some are taking a short- to long-term break from politics.

It’s not the public but elite journalists, chastened by their tarnished reputation and their contributions to Trump’s rise, who have shrunk from challenging the powerful, whether those in power are genocide-supporting Democrats like Biden, or planet-betraying authoritarians like Trump.

 

https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin250117.mp3

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

 

New York Times (1/9/25)

This week on CounterSpin: While the New York Times rolls out claptrap about how both “the left and the right” have ideas about causes behind the devastating Los Angeles wildfires—the right blame DEI hires, while the left blame climate change—many people have moved beyond that sort of stultifying nonsense to work that directly confronts the fossil fuel companies, and their political enablers, for the obvious role that fossil fuels play in climate disruption, and that climate disruption plays in extreme weather events. Many are also now calling out insurance companies that take folks’ money, but then hinder their ability to come out from under when these predictable and predicted crises occur.

Would you be surprised to hear that these powerful industries—fossil fuels and insurers—are intertwined? We talked about it last year with writer and historian Derek Seidman. We’ll hear that conversation on this week’s show.

https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin250117Seidman.mp3

 

19th (12/6/23)

Also on the show: Did you see the coverage of how people with disabilities are dealing with the California fires’ impact? Probably not, given that the place of people with disabilities in elite media coverage ranges roughly from afterthought to absent. We talked about that last year with disability rights advocate and policy analyst Ariel Adelman, in the wake of a Supreme Court case that considered dismantling civil rights protections for people with disabilities, by criminalizing the ways that we learn about whether those protections are actually real. We’ll hear that too.

https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin250117Adelman.mp3

 

Janine Jackson interviewed CEPR’s Dean Baker about China trade policy for the January 10, 2025, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

 

https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin250110.mp3

 

New York Times (12/17/24)

Janine Jackson: New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman’s December 17 piece, headlined “How Elon Musk and Taylor Swift Can Resolve US/China Relations,” contained some choice Friedmanisms, like “more Americans might get a better feel for what is going on there if they simply went and ordered room service at their hotel”—later followed, quaintly, by “a lot of Chinese have grown out of touch with how China is perceived in the world.”

But the big idea is that China has taken a “great leap forward in high-tech manufacturing” because of Donald Trump, who, a source says, “woke them up to the fact that they needed an all-hands-on-deck effort.” And if the US doesn’t respond to China’s “Sputnik” moment the way we did to the Soviet Union, Friedman says, “we will be toast.”

The response has to do with using tariffs on China to “buy time to lift up more Elon Musks” (described as a “homegrown” manufacturer), and for China to “let in more Taylor Swifts,” i.e., chances for its youth to spend money on entertainment made abroad. Secretary of State Tony Blinken evidently “show[ed] China the way forward” last April, when he bought a Swift record on his way to the airport.

Okay, it’s very Thomas Friedman. But how different is it from US media coverage of China and trade policy generally?

Dean Baker is senior economist and co-founder of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, where Beat the Press, his commentary on economic reporting, appears. He’s the author of, among other titles, Rigged: How Globalization and the Rules of the Modern Economy Were Structured to Make the Rich Richer. He joins us now by phone from Utah. Welcome back to CounterSpin, Dean Baker.

Dean Baker: Thanks for having me on, Janine.

JJ: We will talk about news media, of course, but first, there is Trump himself. It’s not our imagination that Trump’s trade ideas, his actions and his stated plans—about China, but overall—they just don’t make much consistent or coherent sense, do they?

Reuters (11/26/24)

DB: Obviously, consistency isn’t a strong point for him, but it does obviously matter to other people. So before he is even in office, he’s threatening both Mexico and Canada. It wasn’t even that clear, at least to me, maybe they got the message what he wants them to do, but if they don’t stop immigrants coming across the border with fentanyl, then he’s going to impose 25% tariffs—I’m going to come back to that word in a second—on both countries.

Now, we have a trade deal with both countries—which, as far as I know, and he certainly didn’t indicate otherwise, they’re following. And it was his trade deal. So what exactly is he threatening with? He’s going to abrogate the trade deal he signed four years ago, because of what, exactly?

And they actually have cooperated with the US in restricting immigrants from coming across the border. Could they do more? Yeah, well, maybe. Canada tries to police fentanyl. So it’s not clear what exactly he thought they would do. Now he’s just said he wants to annex Canada anyhow, so I guess it’s all moot.

But the idea of making these threats is kind of incredible. And, again, he’s threatening, coming back to the word tariff, because a lot of people, and I think including Donald Trump, don’t know what a tariff is. Tariffs are a tax on our imports, and I’ve been haranguing reporters, “Why don’t you just call it a tax on imports?” I can’t believe they can’t use the three words, one of them is very short, instead of tariff, because a lot of people really don’t understand what it is.

And the way Trump talks about it, he makes it sound like we’re charging Canada or Mexico or China, he’s imposing his tariff on, we’re charging them this money, when what we’re actually doing is, we’re charging ourselves the money.

And there’s an economics debate. If we have a 25% tariff on goods from Canada, how much of that will be borne by consumers in the US? How much might be absorbed by intermediaries, and how much might be the exporters in Canada? In all cases, it’s not zero, but almost all, and there’s a lot of work on it, finds that the vast majority is borne by consumers here.

Face the Nation (12/1/24)

So he’s going to punish Canada, going to punish Mexico by imposing a 25% tax on the goods we import from them, which I think to most people probably wouldn’t sound very good, but that is what he’s doing, and it’s kind of a strange policy.

Now, getting to China, I’m not sure what his latest grievance is with China. I’m sure he’s got a list. But he’s talking about a 100% tax on imports from China, and following on the Friedman article, China is at this point, I’m not going to say a rich country, in the sense that, if you look at the average income, it is still considerably lower than the US, and you have a lot poor people in rural areas in China. But in terms of its industrial capacities, it’s huge, and it actually is considerably larger than the United States. So the idea that somehow he’s going to be bringing China to its knees, which seems to be what he thinks—I’m not going to try and get in his head, but just based on what he says, that seems to be what he thinks—that’s a pretty crazy thought.

JJ: And, certainly, we have learned that tariffs are a misunderstood concept by many in the public, and some in the media, as well as some in political office. But that whole picture of Trump threatening to pull out of a deal, in terms of Canada and Mexico, that he made himself, all of that sort of stuff gets us to what you call your “best bet for 2025,” which is improved and increased trade relations between Europe and China. Let’s not be surprised if that happens, for the very reasons that you’re laying out about Trump’s inconsistencies.

Dean Baker: “Trump is saying he doesn’t care about whatever agreements we have, including the ones he signed.” (image: BillMoyers.com)

DB: Basically, Trump is saying he doesn’t care about whatever agreements we have, including the ones he signed. And this has been the way he’s done business throughout his life: He signs a contract, and he doesn’t make good on it. So he has contractors that do things for him, build a building or put in a heating system, whatever it might be. He just says, “no, I’m not going to pay you, sue me.” And maybe he pays half, maybe he pays nothing. He’s prepared to go to court, and spend a lot of money on lawyers. It’s come to be the pattern that most people, including lawyers, insist on getting paid in advance, because they know if they do their work and then come to collect from Trump, they’re not going to get it.

And that’s his approach to international relations as well. So treaties don’t mean anything to him.

And we could have lots of grounds for being unhappy with China. They have a bad human rights record. I’m not going to try to defend it. I don’t think anyone would try to defend it. There are other things you could point to that are not very pretty about China, but just from the standpoint of doing business, they largely follow through on their commitments. Trump doesn’t.

So from the standpoint of Europe, if you want to have trading partners that are reasonably reliable, and won’t pull things out of the air and say, “I want you to do this, I want you to do that,” China looks a hell of a lot better than the United States.

JJ: And so we shouldn’t be surprised, or immediately begin assigning nefarious intentions to European countries who would rather make a deal with China, at this point, than with the US under Trump. It doesn’t make them sketchy or anti-US, necessarily.

Reuters (1/8/25)

DB: That’s right. I mean, I don’t really think they have an alternative, in the sense he takes pride in it. He seems to, at least he says, “I like to be unpredictable.” Well, that’s fine, but if you’re a company in Germany and France, you’re trying to plan for the next five years, ten years: Where’s your market? Where should you build a factory? Where should you look to expand your business? You don’t want to deal with someone who changes everything every day of the week. So China just looks much better from that point.

And also, again, we’re talking about respect for international law. We just saw Donald Trump yesterday saying he doesn’t care about NATO. He’s threatening military force against Greenland and Denmark, implicitly also Canada and Panama, kind of incredible.

So, in that sense, this is not a guy who respects commitments. So I think it’s just kind of common sense from the standpoint, if I were operating a major business in Europe, I would certainly be looking much more to China than the United States right now.

JJ: I did want to say I was hipped to that Friedman piece by CODEPINK’s Megan Russell, who wrote about it, and she had trouble with the idea, among others, that China’s investment in its manufacturing was a recent development that was solely in response to Trump toughness. And that’s what led to what he’s calling their “Sputnik moment.” What do you make of that claim?

FAIR.org (9/29/17)

DB: Well, first off, the investment in manufacturing is longstanding. Because, I saw the Friedman piece, I assumed he was referring to their move into high tech. I think he’s, again, I don’t have access to the inner workings of China’s leadership, I think he is almost certainly exaggerating the extent to which its move was a response to Trump, but they did certainly recognize that they were dealing with a different world with Donald Trump in the White House than Obama, previously.

But the hostilities to China, I mean… Obama, the last couple years of his administration, at least, he was selling the Trans Pacific Partnership, the trade deal that we ended up not completing, as a way to isolate China. I don’t recall if he used that term. “Marginalize” China, I think that was the term they had used.

So the fact that the United States was becoming increasingly anti-China, or hostile to China, that began under Obama. Trump clearly accelerated that. I’m quite sure China would have moved in a big way into high tech in any case, but I suspect this was an accelerant there, that they could say, “Here’s more reason to do it.”

But they’ve been increasing the sophistication of their manufacturing and their technical skills for a long time. They have many, many more computer scientists, engineers, go down the list, than we do. So the idea that it wouldn’t have occurred to them that it’d be good to develop high-tech industries—no, that wasn’t Trump.

JJ: Let me ask you to just unpack, to the extent you feel like it, the big idea that we get from the US press, which is that, No. 1, China is worrisome. Their economy’s growth is inherently troubling and dangerous to the US. And, No. 2, we should consequently insist on, among other things, trade policy that is “tough” on China, somehow, and that will be good for “us.” I mean, there can be nuance, of course, but that seems like the frame a lot of outlets place their China trade coverage within: China is inherently frightening and dangerous to the US, and so we have to somehow use trade policy to beat them back. How useful is that framing?

AP (5/13/24)

DB: I think it’s very wrong-headed in just about every possible way. Obviously, the US has been the leading economy in the world for a long time, so we would always say, well, other countries should recognize that we grow together, so that by having access to cheaper products, better technology, they benefit, trade benefits everyone. That’s the classic story, and economists have been pushing that for centuries. And there’s more than a little bit of truth to that. And that continues to hold true when we talk about China.

So the idea that somehow China growing wealthier is a threat to us is, to my view, kind of wacky. Now, you could raise military issues, and there can be issues, but as far as the economics of it, we benefit by having China be a wealthier country. And we could—I just was tweeting on this—China is now selling electric cars, which are as good as most of the cars you’d get here, for $15,000, $16,000. I think it’d be fantastic if we can get those.

I’m sympathetic to the auto industry, particularly the people in the UAW. I mean, those are still some good-paying jobs. But, damn, you’re looking at Elon Musk, who is charging $40,000 for his cars. I don’t drive an electric car, but I’ve heard people say that the Chinese cars are every bit as good as his cars, and they’re less than half the price. We can’t buy them, though; we have a 100% tariff on them.

So this idea that we’re going to compete—why don’t we talk about cooperating? Why don’t we look for areas where we can cooperate?

And there are clearly some big ones. The two obvious, to my mind, are healthcare and climate. If we had more sharing of technology, think of how much more rapidly we could develop our clean technology, clean industries, electric vehicles, batteries, if we had shared technology more freely.

And in terms of healthcare, again, the pandemic’s not ancient history. If we had shared all of our technology, first and foremost vaccines, but also the treatments, the tests, we could have been far more effective containing the pandemic earlier, and probably saved millions of lives.

And that would apply more generally, obviously, going forward. Hopefully we won’t have another pandemic like that, but we obviously have a lot of diseases we have to deal with, and sharing technology and healthcare would be a fantastic way to do it. But that doesn’t seem to be on the agenda right now. Almost no one is talking about that, from anywhere in the political spectrum, and I just think that’s incredibly unfortunate.

DC Report (1/2/24)

I’ll also add—obviously, I have material interest here—that if you talked about sharing technology, our drug companies might not get patents, and might not make as much money, and they’re not happy to see that. But if the point is to advance public health—and also, for that matter, of the economics; we waste a lot of money on drugs with the current structure—sharing technology would really be a great thing to do.

And I’ll also throw in one more point. This is obviously speculative, but if we want to talk about promoting liberal democracy, seems to me having more contact with people in China, having our technicians or scientists working side by side with them, developing better technology, better ways to deal with disease, better ways to advance clean energy—that’s a really good way to try and influence views in China, because the odds are that a lot of scientists, the technicians who are going to be working side by side with people in the United States are going to be brothers and sisters and children and parents of people who were in the Communist Party, people who were actually calling the shots there.

So when we first opened up to China, allowed them into the WTO in 2000, there was a line that was pushed by proponents of that, saying, “Oh, this is the way to promote democracy.” And I and others said, “I don’t quite see that. We’re going to promote democracy by having people work in shoe factories for two bucks an hour? I don’t quite see that.” And that doesn’t seem to have been the case.

But I think it’s a very different story if we say, “We’re going to have your best scientists working side by side with our scientists, and if you believe in liberal democracy, if you really think that’s a good thing, I think there’s a good chance that will rub off.” So that’s speculative, but I’d like to see us try.

JJ: And I think that’s where a lot of people’s heads are at. A lot of people have family in other countries. They just see things in a global way. It’s weird to be talking, in 2025, it lands weird to talk about “foreign adversary nations,” and how we have to have “trade wars,” in part because of what you’re saying, the positive aspect of working together, in particular by sharing technology, but also it lands weird because Boeing isn’t at war with China. There are conflicts, in other words, but as you’re explaining, the lines aren’t drawn where media suggest they are, at national borders. So that misrepresentation of who the fight is between is part of what obscures these more positive visions.

DB: Yeah, exactly. And Boeing’s at war with Airbus, too. No one’s suggesting—well, I shouldn’t say that; Trump might be suggesting—but most people wouldn’t say that France and Germany are our enemies because Airbus is competing with Boeing. That’s a given. They’re going to compete.

And, again, I’m enough of an economist, I’ll say we benefit from that. So if Airbus produces a better plane, I think that’s great that we’re going to fly on it. If it’s a more fuel-efficient, safer plane than what Boeing has, that’s fantastic. Hopefully Boeing will turn around and build a better one next year.

But it’s supposed to be, we like a market economy. At the end of the day, I do think a market economy is a good thing, so we should think of it the same way with China.

And, again, there are conflicts. Europe subsidizes the Airbus. No one disputes that. China has subsidies for its electric cars. And those are things to discuss, to work out in treaties, but it doesn’t make them an enemy.

JJ: And it doesn’t improve our understanding of our own interest, as individuals, in what’s going on, to have there be this kind of “us and them,” when media are not breaking down exactly who the “us” are. And if we had, in this country, a policy where we wanted to protect workers, or we wanted to ensure wages, well, nothing’s stopping us from doing that on its own.

I think we can expect all of this to amp up, as Trump finds utility in identifying enemies, everywhere and anywhere, that call for conquering, in such ways that enrich his friends. But to the extent that that bellicosity is going to show itself in economic policy, are there things you think we should be looking out for in coverage, being wary of, things to seek out as antidote to maybe the big story that we’re going to be hearing about the US and China?

DB: First and foremost, I am declaring war on the word “tariff.” Given the confusion that word creates, I don’t understand how any reporter could in good faith use the term, at least without adding in parentheses, “taxes on imports,” because it’s not a difficult concept.

And, again, I’m an economist. I’ve known what a tariff is. Obviously many people do know what a tariff is, but the point is a lot of people don’t. So taxes on imports, taxes on imports, taxes on imports. When Donald Trump says he wants to tariff someone, he’s saying he wants to put a tax on the goods we import from them; that’s what he’s doing. And that’s not an arguable point. That’s simply definitional. So that’s one thing, front and center.

CEPR (5/25/24)

The second thing, I really wish people would understand what’s at stake. And the reporting, I think, does not do a good job of it. And when we talk about putting taxes on the imports, particularly with China, that we’re making items that would otherwise be available to us at relatively low cost, at ridiculously high cost.

So cars first and foremost, but we’re doing with the batteries from China, a lot of other things. If we’re concerned about global warming, we should want to see this technology spread as quickly as possible.

I wrote a piece on this a while back. So let’s say that the US had a plan to subsidize the adoption of clean technologies around the world. We’d all applaud that, wouldn’t we, say that was a great thing. Well, China’s doing that, and we’re treating them like it’s an act of war.

So, again, I’m sympathetic to auto workers. I have a lot of friends over the years who were auto workers, and I respect enormously the United Auto Workers union, but it’s not an act of war for them to make low-cost cars available to us.

And just the third thing, when we talk about protectionism, I’ve made this point many, many times over the years. The most extreme protectionism we have are patent and copyright protections. These are government-granted monopolies.

Now, I understand they’re policies for a specific purpose. They promote innovation, they promote creative work, understood. But they’re policies, they’re protectionism, they’re not the market.

And that’s something we should always be aware of, in trade and other areas, even domestically; we’re raising the price of items that are protected enormously, and treating this as just the market. So drugs that cost thousands, or even tens of thousands of dollars, almost invariably cost $10, $20, $30 in the absence of patent protection.

And people should understand that this is a really big deal. It’s a big intervention in the market, and also a huge source of inequality. I like to make the joke, Bill Gates would still be working for a living—he’d probably be getting Social Security now, he’s an old guy—but he’d probably still be working for a living if the government didn’t threaten to arrest anyone who copies Microsoft software without his permission. And it really does make a big difference, and it’s literally never discussed.

So those are some items. I can give you a longer list, but those would be my starting point.

JJ: All right, then; we’ll pause at your starting point, but just for now.

We’ve been speaking with Dean Baker, co-founder and senior economist at the Center for Economic and Policy Research. You can find their work, and Dean’s Beat the Press commentary, at CEPR.net. Dean Baker, thank you so much for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

DB: Thanks for having me on.

 

CBS Evening News (1/13/25) cited Colorado’s 2021 Marshall Fire as another example of how climate disruption is making wildfires more destructive.

The devastation of the ongoing Los Angeles fires is an alarm going off, but also the result of society having hit the snooze button long ago (Democracy Now!, 1/9/25; CBS, 1/13/25). Game-changing fires destroyed Paradise, California (NPR, 11/8/23), in 2023, and Lahaina, Hawaii, in 2024—clear warnings, if any were still needed, that the climate catastrophe had arrived.

“The evidence connecting the climate crisis and extreme wildfires is clear,” the Nature Conservancy (7/9/24) said. “Increased global temperatures and reduced moisture lead to drier conditions and extended fire seasons.”

The scientific journal Fire Ecology (7/24/23) reported that “climate change is expected to continue to exacerbate impacts to forested ecosystems by increasing the frequency, size and severity of wildfires across the western United States.”

Now we are watching one of America’s largest cities burn. It’s a severe reminder that the kind of disruption we experienced in the beginning of the Covid pandemic in 2020 is the new normal under climate change.

The right-wing media, however, have found a culprit—it’s not climate change, but Democratic Party–led wokeness. The coverage demonstrates once again that the W-word can be used to blame literally anything in the Murdoch fantasyland.

‘Preoccupation With DEI’

Alyssia Finley (Wall Street Journal, 1/12/25): “A cynic might wonder if environmentalists interfered with fire prevention in hope of evicting humans.” Another cynic might wonder if the Journal publishes smears without evidence as part of its business model.

“Megyn Kelly sounded off on Los Angeles Fire Department Chief Kristin Crowley and Mayor Karen Bass,” the New York Post (1/8/25) reported. Former Fox News host Kelly said “that the officials’ preoccupation with diversity, equity and inclusion [DEI] programs distracted them from the city’s fire-combating duties.”

Wall Street Journal editorial board member Allysia Finley (1/12/25) echoed the charge: “Bloated union contracts and DEI may not have directly hampered the fire response, but they illustrate the government’s wrongheaded priorities.” In other words, the paper didn’t have evidence to blame the fires on firefighter salaries or department diversity, but decided to insinuate as much anyway.

Other conservative journalists were more direct, like CNN pundit Scott Jennings, who went on CNN NewsNight (1/8/25) to assert: 

As a matter of public policy in California, the main interest in the fire department lately has been in DEI programming and budget cuts, and now we have this massive fire, and people are upset.

As the Daily Beast (1/9/25) noted, “His response was part of a Republican kneejerk reaction that included President-elect Donald Trump blaming ‘liberals’ and state Gov. Gavin Newsom.”

The Washington Post (1/10/25) reported that Trump-supporting X owner Elon Musk

has been inundating his 212 million followers with posts casting blame for the blazes on Democrats and diversity policies, amplifying narratives that have taken hold among far-right activists and Republican leaders.

Liel Leibovitz, editor-at-large at the conservative Jewish magazine Tablet, blamed the LA devastation on the “woke religion” (New York Post, 1/9/25).

“There are many things we’ve learned that the Los Angeles Fire Department needs—and more women firefighters isn’t one of them,” moaned National Review editor-in-chief Rich Lowry (New York Post, 1/15/25). “Los Angeles for years has been in the grips of a bizarre obsession with recruiting more women firefighters.”

Blaming gay singers

Mentioned by Fox News (1/10/25): $13,000 allocated to Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Heritage Month programs. Not mentioned by Fox News: a $126 million boost to the LAPD budget.

Fox & Friends (1/9/25, 1/9/25) blamed the city’s Democratic leaders and the fire chief for the destruction. Fox News Digital (1/10/25) said:

While Los Angeles officials were stripping millions in funding from their fire department ahead of one of the most destructive wildfires in state history, hundreds of thousands of dollars were allocated to fund programs such as a “Gay Men’s Chorus” and housing for the transgender homeless.

You may notice the shift from “millions” to “hundreds of thousands”—the latter, obviously, can’t explain what happened to the former. What can far better explain it is that the city focused much more on funding cops than firefighters (Intercept, 1/8/25). The mayor’s budget plan offered “an increase of more than $138 million for the Los Angeles Police Department; and a decrease of about $23 million for the LA Fire Department” (KTTV, 4/22/24). KABC (1/9/25) reported more recent numbers, saying the “fire department’s budget was cut by $17.6 million,” while the “city’s police department budget increased by $126 million,” according to the city’s controller.

And in 2023, the LA City Council approved salary increases for cops over objections that these pay boosts “would pull money away from mental health clinicians, homeless outreach workers and many other city needs” (LA Times, 8/23/23). The cop-pay deal was reportedly worth $1 billion (KNBC, 8/23/23).

LAFD cuts under Mayor Bass were, in fact, big news (KTTV, 1/15/25). Fox overlooked the comparison with the police, one regularly made by city beat reporters who cover public safety and city budgets, and went straight to blaming gay singers.

Crusade against ‘woke’

Contrary to the Daily Mail‘s headline (1/14/25), former California first lady Maria Shriver Maria Shriver did not “tear into LA’s woke leaders”; rather, she complained about LA’s insufficient funding of public needs.

Or take the Daily Mail (1/14/25), a right-wing British tabloid with a huge US footprint, whose headline said former California first lady “Maria Shriver Is Latest Celebrity to Tear Into LA’s Woke Leaders.” But the story went on to say that Shriver had decried the cuts to the LAFD, citing no evidence that she was fighting some culture war against women firefighters.

Shriver, the ex-wife of actor and former California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, was pointing the finger at austerity and calling for more public spending. In other words, Shriver was siding with LAFD Chief Kristin Crowley, who had complained that city budget cuts had failed her department (CNN, 1/12/25). The Mail’s insistence on calling this a crusade against “woke” is just another example of how tediously the conservative media apply this word to almost anything.

While these accusations highlight diversification in the LA firefighting force, the right never offers real evidence that these hiring practices lead to any kind of hindering of fire response, as University of Southern California education professor Shaun Harper (Time, 1/13/25) noted. If anything, the right admits that miserly budgeting, usually considered a virtue in the conservative philosophy, is the problem.

Equal opportunity disasters

These talking points among right-wing politicians and their sycophants in the media serve several purposes. They bury the idea that climate change, driven by fossil fuels and out-of-control growth, has anything to do with the rise in extreme weather. They pin the blame on Democrats: LA is a blue city in a blue state. And they continue the racist and sexist drumbeat that all of society’s ills can be pinned on the advancement of women and minorities.

There is, of course, an opportunity to look at political mismanagement, including the cutbacks in the fire department. But natural disasters—intensified by climate change and exacerbated by poor political leadership—have ravaged unwoke, Republican-dominated states, as well, meaning Democrats don’t have a monopoly on blame.

Hurricane Ian practically destroyed Sanibel Island in Florida, a state that has been living with Trumpism for some time under Gov. Ron DeSantis. Hurricane Helene also ravaged that state, as well as western North Carolina, a state that went to Trump in the last three elections. Hurricane Harvey drowned Texas’ largest city, Houston, and the rest of Texas has suffered power outages and shortages, due to both extreme cold and summer spikes in energy demand.

Climate change, and the catastrophes it brings to the earth, does not discriminate against localities based on their populations’ political leanings. But conservative media do.

Metastasizing mythology

Ari Paul (In These Times, 8/31/15): “The more progress made in racial and gender diversity, the more white male firefighters will denounce the changes and say that increased diversity is only the result of lowering standards.”

Meanwhile, real firefighters know what the real problem is. The Western Fire Chiefs Association (3/5/24) said:

Global warming pertains to the increased rise in Earth’s average surface temperature, largely caused by human activity, such as burning fossil fuels and deforestation. These practices emit greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide (CO2), methane (CH4) and nitrous oxide (N2O) into the atmosphere. These gases trap heat, resulting in a gradual increase in global temperatures over time. Recent data on fire and trends suggests that global extreme fire incidents could rise by up to 14% by the year 2030, 30% by 2050, and 50% by the end of the century. The impact of global warming is seen particularly in the western United States, where record-setting wildfires have occurred in recent years. Fourteen of the 20 largest wildfires on record have been in California over the past 15 years.

Conservative media can ignore all this, because the notion that cultural liberalism has tainted firefighting isn’t new. I covered efforts to diversify the New York City Fire Department as a reporter for the city’s labor-focused weekly Chief-Leader, and I saw firsthand that the resistance to the efforts were based on the idea that minority men weren’t smart enough and women (white and otherwise) weren’t strong enough (PBS, 3/28/06; New York Times, 3/18/14; In These Times, 8/31/15).

What I found interesting in that case was that other major fire departments had achieved higher levels of integration, and no one was accusing those departments of falling behind in their duties. At the same time, while the FDNY resisted diversification, the New York Police Department, almost worshipped by right-wing media, embraced it (New York Post, 9/8/14, 6/10/16).

This racist and sexist mythology has metastasized in the Republican Party and its propaganda apparatus for years. With Trump coming back into power, these media outlets will feel more empowered to regurgitate this line of thinking, both during this disaster in LA and in the disasters ahead of us.

 

The Washington Post (1/3/25) argued that “serious accountability is possible” in Israel—by which it meant that Ariel Sharon once had to change his cabinet job after he let thousands of civilians be murdered.

In two instances in the past couple of weeks, the Washington Post has acknowledged criticisms made by FAIR activists and others. Post editors may not be backing down, but they are hearing you.

The first response was a Washington Post editorial (1/3/25) headlined “Readers Disagreed With Us on Israel and the ICC. Here’s Our Response.” This was an attempt to defend an earlier Post editorial, “The International Criminal Court Is Not the Venue to Hold Israel to Account” (11/24/24), which had been the subject of a FAIR Action Alert (11/26/24) and widespread criticism elsewhere (e.g., X, 11/25/24).

The centerpiece of the Post‘s defense of its editorial that said the ICC should not hold Israeli leaders responsible for war crimes was its claim that “serious accountability is possible, even probable,” from Israel’s own institutions.

Oddly, the evidence the paper offered for this was that after the IDF allowed right-wing Lebanese militias to slaughter thousands of Palestinian civilians at the Sabra and Shatilla refugee in 1982, Israel formed a commission to investigate the mass murder, and as a result, then–Defense Minister Ariel Sharon was made to resign from his post. This outcome was widely viewed as “show[ing] Israelis were willing to hold their top leaders to account,” the Post wrote.

The Post did not note that while stepping down as Defense minister, Sharon remained in the cabinet as a minister without portfolio, held one cabinet ministry after another throughout most of the 1980s and ’90s, and became prime minister of Israel from 2001–06. If that’s the Post‘s best example of Israelis “hold[ing] their top leaders to account,” hopes that anyone will face real justice in Israel for the war crimes against Gaza are very slim.

‘Extra careful…when it comes to our owner’

One of a dozen cartoons (Greater Quiet, 1/7/25) drawn in solidarity with the muzzled Ann Telnaes—this one by Ted Littleford of the New Haven Independent.

Post editorial page editor David Shipley made another retort to a criticism in a FAIR Action Alert (1/7/25) in an internal memo published by the media news site Status (1/10/25). Along with many others (e.g., Pennsylvania Capital-Star, 1/10/25), FAIR had criticized Shipley and the Post for killing a cartoon that lampooned billionaire Post owner Jeff Bezos’ obsequious relationship with Donald Trump, leading to the resignation of cartoonist Ann Telnaes.

FAIR’s Pete Tucker said it was “bizarre” for Shipley (New York Times, 1/3/25) to claim that he spiked Telnaes’ cartoon because an earlier column mentioned in passing Bezos dining with Trump at Mar-a-Lago. Shipley claimed that his only bias was “against repetition”—as if the Post, like other papers, doesn’t routinely run cartoons on topics that columnists are also writing about. FAIR cited examples from recent weeks of Post cartoons that echoed Post columns.

In his memo, Shipley seemed to acknowledge this line of criticism: “It’s obviously true that we have published other pieces that are redundant and duplicative.” He admitted that he was being “extra careful,” and that his “scrutiny is on high when it comes to our owner.”

He defended this approach as necessary “to ensure the overall independence of our report.” By “exercising care” in coverage of their owner, “we preserve the ability to do what we are in business to do: to speak forthrightly and without fear about things that matter.”

In other words, if the Post doesn’t watch how it talks about Bezos, he might stop subsidizing it to the tune of 0.04% of his net worth annually—and then the paper won’t be able to talk “about things that matter.”

As if anything matters more than the nation’s most powerful oligarchs forming an alliance with Trump.

 

Janine Jackson interviewed Rising Up!‘s Sonali Kolhatkar and Laura Flanders and Friends‘ Laura Flanders about independent media and the year ahead for the January 3, 2025, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin250103.mp3

 

 

Janine Jackson: Among many other things, 2024 was a series of reminders that corporate news media, tasked primarily with enriching the rich and shoring up entrenched institutions, will not, today or ever, do the liberatory, illuminating work of independent reporting, that boldly speaks truth to power, that stands up for the societally voiceless, that provides space for the debates and discussions we need to move society forward—for those of us that believe that US society needs to change.

New calendar years are symbolic, sure, but they can also offer a metaphorical fresh start. Why not see 2025 as a much-needed opportunity to acknowledge, support, create and grow independent journalism?

We’ll talk about that today with two people who are and have been doing—not just critical, dissident, uplifting journalism, but the thinking and advocating around why we need it, and the role it can play.

***

FAIR.org (11/14/24)

Between Donald Trump’s overt threats to use his power to go after his media critics, and many corporate news media’s evident eagerness to preemptively submit, we are in dark days for journalism, and the public’s right to know, and debate, and decide, that good journalism feeds.

The notion that the Chinese character for crisis combines that of danger and opportunity is not really precise etymology, but you can see why that concept has resonance. If we don’t use this time, both to do hard-hitting, smart, independent reporting, and to think deeply about the keystone place independent reporting occupies in a society with democratic aspirations, well, what are we up to? And how do we engage audiences in the collaborative work of that independent, even dissident, reporting?

Sonali Kolhatkar is a journalist, activist and artist. She’s host and executive producer of the radio show Rising Up! With Sonali, author of the book Rising Up: The Power of Narrative in Pursuing Racial Justice, and the racial justice and civil liberties editor at Yes! Magazine, among myriad other things.

Laura Flanders is also many things, including the host and executive producer of Laura Flanders and Friends, formerly the Laura Flanders Show, airing on PBS stations around the country. She’s author of books, including Blue Grit: Making Impossible, Improbable and Inspirational Change in America, and Real Majority, Media Minority: The High Cost of Sidelining Women in Reporting. And she is the founding host and producer of CounterSpin.

They both somehow found time to join me now by phone from various parts of the country. Welcome back to CounterSpin, Sonali Kolhatkar and Laura Flanders.

Sonali Kolhatkar: Thank you.

Laura Flanders: It’s great to be with you.

JJ: I think we can start by saying we’re staggered. I think that’s fair to say. It isn’t that we didn’t anticipate the possibility of another emboldened Trump administration, but that doesn’t mean we had our heads around it.

And I just want to ask you both, how do you, first, address questions of, “Well, you’re the media expert, so what now?” Are we allowed to say, “I don’t know”? How do you see your responsibilities to audience, many of them keenly vulnerable and underserved right now? Do you feel like there’s something you’re supposed to be saying or doing in this moment? Sonali, I’ll ask you first.

Rising Up (11/13/24)

SK: Sure. For me, I am looking at it in the way that I think many Americans are looking at it, but aren’t seeing articulated in the mainstream media, which is that this election was not as much a win for Donald Trump and the Republican Party as much as it was a loss for the Democratic Party. It is, over and over again, the Democratic Party—which claims to uphold the ideals that most Americans adhere to, which is the politics of compassion—[that] let us down, and let us down so badly that people are just alienated from the political system.

And so for me, as a journalist, I tend to want to try to go to where young people are. We are playing with their future, right, so what are young people thinking about these days? And I also try to understand the cultural moments that we’re living in, and how we shape culture.

I write about narrative, I think about narrative a lot. So young people are, for example, really, really cheering on the alleged shooter of a health insurance CEO, which you would think might be a bizarre turn of events. But if you look at the situation they’re living in, it makes sense. And young people are culturally in a different place than, certainly, the old guard, and they are hungry for a shift in politics.

And so, for me, I see myself as a journalist thinking about how we win that cultural change, how we start overwhelming the pro-billionaire culture that comes both from politicians, both Democrats and Republicans alike, and our mainstream media. How do we overwhelm that with a narrative that’s centered on collective liberation, which is where a lot of young people are, with a narrative that’s centered on: We are all free when we pool our resources together and fight for one another, and really center justice in our work, whether it comes to fair wages, union representation, healthcare, good jobs, solving the climate crisis, and so on. And so my job as a journalist, is to be part of that cultural conversation that I think we desperately need.

Laura Flanders: “What is important…is that we report on those stories in a way that also gives people some sense of what can be done and is being done.”

LF: I would simply add that I think part of our responsibility, or a large part of what I seek to do, is to provide a contrast to the commercial, corporate, for-profit media. So where, for example, we see our mainstream (so-called) media emphasize people over policy, and love breaks rather than continuities, and situations rather than systems. I think our job is to look at the policies that are playing out in our political system, not just the people, the players, who’s up and who’s down, what’s the success of this candidate versus that one, but which policies are working in which ways, what systems are in place that are leading us to this moment, not just this crisis or that one, prompted by this or that in the last two cycles, perhaps, but ongoing systems, particularly of inequality.

And I think in this last election, we had a lot of discussion of the economy, and you had the sort of pro–Democratic Party media berating American voters for not understanding that the economy was better than they thought it was. You had American politicians doing the same thing. Whereas the reality is, you’re looking at a half century of barely any movement when it comes to most people’s wages. And I think what is important about that is that we report on those stories in a way that also gives people some sense of what can be done and is being done, which is not to make up things, but to report on the ground.

NPR (12/24/24)

In the end of the last year, we saw extraordinary strike action by Starbucks workers and Amazon workers, right during the holiday season. And, again, kind of like that sympathy for Luigi Mangione, the accused killer of the healthcare CEO, right beneath the surface is this level of fury at the way things are, and a willingness, even, to act, not always the most well-guided, but willingness and interest in acting.

And if those stories don’t get covered, and we’re only covering what’s happening in Washington, then I think we’re always in this kind of, I don’t know, forward/back, high/low, mood-shift, personality-driven news cycle that doesn’t leave much of a place for real-life people’s engagement. And I think our job is to try to keep people engaged.

JJ: I’m just going to draw you out on that a little bit, because I’ve asked Laura this before: What’s so funny about peace, love and solutions journalism? When you show groups that are, for instance, winning workplace victories, blocking supermarket mergers, increasing minimum wages, they’re developing mutual aid networks that are working around dominant institutions, I don’t understand why some smart leftists think that that’s unserious, or that that’s Pollyanna as news coverage. I just don’t get it.

Truthout (10/20/24)

LF: Well, one of the problems with our human brain chemistry, which apparently responds much better to negative news than to positive, it just has a bigger endorphin rush response to the negative, because we believe we have to act, the fight or flight. So we have biology to deal with. But we also have corporate bias.

And I think it is up to us to figure out how to make some of those good news stories, or at least those engaged activists, democracy stories, as exciting and as inspiring as the rest. And I think we have seen that. I mean, let’s face it, the Amazon warehouse organizers became, for a moment at least, kind of popular heroes. We’ve seen an excitement around the revitalization of the labor movement, which isn’t only personality-based.

Part of the problem, though, is that our media structures, our most influential media institutions, are in the hands of those who are threatened by exactly that kind of organizing. So are the best marketing and media manipulation minds going to be brought to those stories? That’s our struggle.

At the end of the day, we are in a competition for attention, an attention economy, and people like us, Sonali and I, for all of our good intentions, simply don’t have the same kind of resources for bells and whistles that the networks have.

So I don’t want to plead, it’s not a cop out, but we need to exercise special creativity, I think. And you’ve put your finger on exactly the problem: The algorithms don’t work for us, and we have to figure out how to address that.

JJ: Sonali?

Sonali Kolhatkar: “It’s not as much about likes and clicks and algorithms, as much as it is about actually solving the problem.”

SK: I have a bit of a controversial take on this as well. I mean, definitely in full agreement with what Laura said, but let me go a little bit further, and I feel like I’m in the right environment to say this right now with you, which is I think that we have a failure on the left, in left media, because we’ve witnessed this kind of bro-ification of left media that whips up anger. We have the sort of Joe Rogans of the left, too. A lot of dudes, many white dudes, some brown dudes, who will whip up the anger, will feed and fuel the cynicism, because it gets them the clicks, and gets them the follows, and feeds their ego. It doesn’t actually emphasize the solutions, because the solution would mean that maybe they aren’t as necessary anymore.

And I find a huge difference in the way in which communities of color and journalists of color and women journalists are covering solutions, and covering the problems of our world through a solutions lens, because the urgency for us is so real. We’re on the front lines. It’s not as much about likes and clicks and algorithms, as much as it is about actually solving the problem. And I really do feel like we have a reckoning that needs to happen even in the left media.

LF: I love that. And I just want to add that it is nothing controversial to say there’s still some white patriarchy out there that’s holding us back. Totally agree.

JJ: Absolutely. I want to ask you both, were there particular conversations or things or groups or work that you engaged in 2024 that surprised you, or that fortified you for the road forward, or that made you feel like, here’s some sustenance, and just what inspired you in the last year that you think is good to talk about and think about now?

LF: I have to say, and maybe this is controversial, but I have been moved by the determination and insistence of the anti-Zionist movement in this country to continue to raise their voice, to continue to protest genocide in their name, to continue to take to the streets, and to take the media to task, against all the odds, and in spite of the ocean of negative coverage and negative policing that they’ve been subject to.

So I will say I’ve been inspired, I won’t say excited and made happy by, because not enough has changed at the level of policy, and the killing and dying continues at an absolutely unacceptable rate. But I think for a conversation that has been so slow and coming, that fury around the war against all things and places Palestinian, it seems, has been persistent, determined and, as I said, kind of against the odds. So it gives me both courage and determination. If they can do it, I can do it too.

SK: Ditto. One hundred percent. Especially seeing young folks on campuses.

Democracy Now! (3/5/21)

I have really felt inspired by an abolitionist framework that so many, mostly Black women, have led our country into, but it is not getting enough attention. And an abolitionist framework has really helped me see and apply a lens to the world that I feel like we need to shift towards.

So the conversations that I’ve had, which will be interviews published in this book coming out next year, were with people who are doing very, very critical frontline work, and are connecting the dots between racial capitalism and how law enforcement are basically enforcers of racial capitalism, and how in order to achieve collective liberation, we need to address policing and prisons, and move all that money out of the enforcement of racial capitalism into a just world, into collective solidarity, into having an equity economy–and that’s really what an abolition framework is. And I don’t think a lot of people realize that when activists have said “defund the police,” that’s the tip of the iceberg, and there’s 90% of the iceberg below water that involves moving money out of the architecture of death-making institutions, as Mariame Kaba says, and into the public education we desperately need, and public healthcare, publicly funded healthcare, and higher minimum wages and good jobs and all of those things that Americans want.

And having that abolitionist framework has opened my mind up, and I feel like the time has more than come. We need to take this lens and apply it to everything, to defund the military and fund the things that make us safe, which applies to Palestine, right? Defund the police and prisons and apply it to healthcare, the whole conversation around corporate CEOs and how they’re enriching themselves off of people’s misery. An abolitionist framework can apply to everything.

So I’m really inspired by that. That’s my resolution for 2025, is to really start talking in those terms. Because I think when we have the holistic view of the world and how the economy works, we address systemic racial injustice, we address gender injustice, we address corporate CEO billionaires making off with all of our money. So that’s the thing that inspires me now.

JJ: That leads me onto a question that’s kind of a behind-the-scenes question, for listeners. But between us as producers, so much of what we want to do is to bring different people into conversation, to say that the folks, the talking heads, you see on TV are not the only folks you need to hear from. There are a lot of other folks doing important work who have things to say. But we know that those folks aren’t the folks who are waiting by the phone to get on the media, and there’s more work involved in getting those voices into the conversation.

I just wonder, is there anything that either of you would like to say to listeners, like, this goes on behind the scenes, this is part of the work of doing independent reporting. Are there gears and switches that you’d like to just let folks in on, in terms of this work that, obviously we are thrilled to do, but it’s different than just showing up somewhere with a microphone.

FAIR.org (12/16/24)

LF: I’ve been thinking a lot about how the future looks, and how this moment looks, and my next season of the show, and all the rest. And you mentioned at the very beginning, you referred to the kind of preemptive submission of some of the most powerful media in our world, the Disneys of the world, to the oligarchs of the Trump administration. And that kind of anticipatory obedience by the most powerful has been chilling to observe. It’s been chilling, in part, because I think the way that I do my work is to plug into a lot of the networks that I’ve been lucky to be part of over the years.

I mean, none of us does this work alone. Media, as I’ve constantly said, is a plural noun, and if the commercial media’s job is to deliver eyeballs and ears to the advertisers, then ours is to deliver people to each other.

So it’s all about relationship-building, it’s about showing up, it’s about not being in the studio, it’s about being in relationship both to the audience and to the issues, and increasingly to the ever-expanding ecosystem of independent media makers, who are out there. They may not be the bros sounding off behind their computers, but in almost every community these days, there are independent grassroots media who are making their voices heard, who are covering what is happening regionally and locally.

And I think our unique position, Sonali’s and mine and yours, Janine, is that we exist in that middle space between the grassroots and local and the national discussion. So I think that my job is very much, how do we bring those stories that are percolating at the local and regional level into the national debate, into the national discussion, or just to a national audience, and not so as simply to sort of show how great we are, but to showcase the extraordinary wealth of talent and intelligence that exists just about everywhere.

And I raised that in relation to the anticipatory obedience of the powerful, because I have my fears for those journalists who are operating as independent agents at the local level, independently, perhaps, as solo “content creators,” trying their best to create their own brand, which is what so many of them now think is their future, standing alone against the tide. That’s a scary place to be in this moment.

So I’m not answering perhaps the “how” question as much as the “what I think is important” question, and that is for all of us to share the word, as widely as we can, that everybody needs to support their local media creators and the media that they consume, that they benefit from. Whoever it is, pay your pledge, pay your subscription.

The other way we spend most of our time is trying to raise money. I’m not going to complain, but it’s part of the package, and it’s how we survive. So I’m hoping the audience will look around and say, “Who do I want to really support?” If only by sharing, if only by liking, if only by spreading the word.

JJ: One thing that both of you do that not everyone does, including in independent media, is look around the world. We often hear about Americans this and the US that, when we know that so many of us were born elsewhere, have family elsewhere, are connected to people outside these shores. It seems like it’s only US corporate media who don’t acknowledge that we are one interconnected world, and I feel like that’s an important thing that independent journalism contributes, right, is that beyond-the-US worldview. How important is that?

LF: Very. I used the word sanctuary before, and I think as much as we have to think about sanctuary for others who want to come to the United States, I think often of the sanctuary that I find reading the media of other places, covering stories elsewhere. At the same time, though, I will say, in these times, it’s not just sanctuary. It’s kind of solidarity, as we communicate with journalists in Brazil or Hungary or India, and get their experience of what they’ve been through, dealing with their own version of this kind of concentration of power, these oligarchs, this sense of authoritarianism rising.

We all do need to understand that we are in the same boat, and there are things we can learn from one another, and there’s sanctuary we can give to one another. But, yeah, we are not alone on this bus, and that is both a comfort and concern at times. But it would be insane of us, and we would be ignoring a lot of important intelligence and creativity, to focus only on one little bit of this planet, even though our corporate media would have us believe we’re the most powerful and important piece of the planet ever to be born.

SK: It’s weird. I think I used to feel that way more so than I do now, because I feel like our country has become a bunch of mini-countries. For example, just the whole conversation on healthcare in America: If you go on TikTok, and you see the celebrations of Luigi Mangione, there’s a whole bunch of people from other countries, including in the Global South, who are posting comments being sorry for us as Americans, being sorry for us and going, “Oh, you poor things. I’m happy to pay 25% taxes, because I know that my healthcare and everybody’s healthcare is getting covered.”

And I do feel that there are huge swaths of this country that are utterly ignored by mainstream media, by left media. We have an incarcerated population of 1.2 million Americans that are just written off, and we forget to cover them. We have populations of immigrants who are undocumented, and that’s where, first, the globalist view also comes in, that are just written off. We have populations of very, very poor people who are just barely getting by, who never make the consideration.

And so I feel like some on the left I feel aren’t paying enough attention to everything that’s happening in the United States, and we’re focused sometimes even more on the horrible impact that our weapons are having in other countries, as rightfully we should be paying attention, but we’re not also effectively enough linking the dots, to how the money for those weapons is devastating our cities, because we’re just not spending money on them. Actually, I want to see more US coverage in a way that compares us to other nations, and points out how terribly off we are.

Laura Flanders & Friends (10/21/20)

LF: To echo what Sonali said before, in 2016, last time in the first Trump administration, I went off and started reporting on cooperative economics as a model of resistance to fascism in Spain, in Greece, you name it. This time, I’m staying right here. There are a lot of models to report on right here in the US, and we’re going to be doing a lot of that. So I’d be excited to check in with you all, maybe, I don’t know, 12 months from now, what do you think?

JJ: We’ve been speaking with Sonali Kolhatkar and Laura Flanders. You can find their work, their shows, their books—existing and forthcoming—online, as well as on radio and public TV, and I will be putting up links to everything on FAIR.org. Sonali Kolhatkar, Laura Flanders, thank you so much for helping us look into the new year and for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

SK: Thank you so much, Laura and Janine, and thanks, Janine, especially for having us on.

LF: Thank you so much, Janine—and Sonali, what a pleasure to be on with you.

 

Remember when the exuberant yelling of Gov. Howard  Dean was enough for corporate media to declare him unfit for the presidency (Extra!, 3–4/04)?

Remember January 2004, when Democratic presidential candidate Howard Dean yelled in a pep talk to supporters after the Iowa caucus, and elite media declared that his “growling and defiant” “emotional outburst” was patent evidence of unacceptability? Having  already declared Dean too excitable—“Yelling and hollering is not an endearing quality in the leader of the free world,” said the Washington Post (8/2/03)—media found verification in the “Dean scream,” which was played on TV news some 700 times, enough to finish off his candidacy (Extra!, 3–4/04). As Pat Buchanan on the McLaughlin Group (1/23/04) scoffed: “Is this the guy who ought to be in control of our nuclear arsenal?”

Fast forward to the present day, when Donald Trump states, “For purposes of National Security and Freedom throughout the World the United States of America feels that the ownership and control of Greenland is an absolute necessity.”

And today’s journalistic response looks like a CBS News explainer (1/8/25), headed “Why Would Trump Want Greenland and the Panama Canal? Here’s What’s Behind US interest.”  It’s simple, you see, and not at all weird. “Greenland has oil, natural gas and highly sought after mineral resources.” And you know what? “Western powers have already voiced concern about Russia and China using it to boost their presence in the North Atlantic.”

In an effort to make Trump’s proposal seem rational, CBS (1/8/25) offered a map that made Greenland look like a chokepoint on the all-important Dalian/Rotterdam sea route. In fact, Greenland is more than 1,500 miles from Eurasia—greater than the distance between Boston and New Orleans.

CBS tells us Trump is “falsely alleging” that the Panama Canal is being “operated by China,” but then adds in their own, awkward, words, “China has also denied trying to claim any control over the canal.” Takeaway: who knows, really? Believe what you want. PS—you’re Americun, right?

The New York Times (1/2/25) assured us that,” Trump’s Falsehoods Aside, China’s Influence Over Global Ports Raises Concerns.” The story made it obvious that Chinese companies in charge of shipping ports is inherently scary—what might they do?—in a way that the US having 750 military bases around the world never is.

The message isn’t that no one country should have that much power; it’s that no country except the US should have that much power. That assumption suffuses corporate news reporting; and China threatens it. So whatever China does or doesn’t do, look for that lens to color any news you get.

Featured image: MSNBC (12/23/24)

 

Three vehicular attacks in public areas shocked the world this past holiday season. First was the attack on a Christmas market in Magdeburg, Germany, which killed six people and injured dozens (Reuters, 1/6/25). Then there was the New Year’s attack in New Orleans’ French Quarter, killing at least 14 people and injuring more (CNN, 1/2/25). A suicide car explosion outside the Trump International Hotel in Las Vegas on New Year’s Day only killed the attacker, but injured bystanders (NBC, 1/1/25).

In the German case, the Saudi-born suspect, Taleb al-Abdulmohsen, had a history of dark social media posts, including a declaration of far-right, anti-Islamic positions. In New Orleans, the killer, Shamsud-Din Jabbar, who did not survive the attack, declared his support for the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS). In Las Vegas, the suspected suicide bomber, former Green Beret Matthew Livelsberger, left behind chaotic anti-government, pro-Trump rants.

Corporate media framed these attacks differently, focusing on Jabbar’s Islamist beliefs but downplaying Abdulmohsen and Livelsberger’s political stances. The right-wing press, predictably, did this to an extreme.

‘The US homeland isn’t safe’

Washington Post (1/3/24): “Islamic State…is still a potent source of radicalization.”

In the New Orleans case, the New York Times (e.g., 1/2/25, 1/4/25) focused on Jabbar’s Islamic radicalization and support for ISIS, using these facts in the leads and sometimes headlines. “New Orleans Attacker Was ‘Inspired’ by ISIS, Biden Says,” read the headline of an early Times report (1/1/25).

The Washington Post did the same, in articles like “Attacker With ISIS Flag Drives Truck Into New Orleans Crowd, Killing 15” (1/2/24) and “Inspired by ISIS: From a Taylor Swift Plot in Vienna to Carnage in New Orleans” (1/3/24).

Jabbar is believed to have acted alone (Wall Street Journal, 1/2/25), although he was clearly inspired by the notorious entity. Because both he and the Las Vegas attacker had served many years in the US military, the incidents raised questions about mental health for active service members and veterans (The Hill, 1/4/25). Jabbar’s brother speculated that mental health issues could have been at play (ABC, 1/2/25).

Yet the acronym ISIS still loomed large in the news stories and headlines, and it is clearly one that can spark fear in the hearts of news consumers.

‘Puzzled over the motive’

Reporting on the Germany attack, CBS (12/30/24) highlighted the possibility of mental illness, not the suspect’s far-right views.

Just as the “Islamic radicalism” framing can whip up anti-Islamic sentiment in the United States, where a notorious Islamophobe is set to become president, the Magdeburg suspect’s Saudi origin has explosive potential in Germany’s polarized political moment. The far-right Alternative for Deutschland (AfD) has used the situation to advance its anti-immigrant agenda (Al Jazeera, 12/23/24; Le Monde, 12/24/24). But there’s a twist: Abdulmohsen held and voiced similar political views to the AfD’s.

The New York Times (12/22/24) and the Washington Post (12/21/24), to their credit, did put this fact up top in their coverage. But elsewhere, the coverage was more muddled, focusing more on the possibility of mental illness rather than Abdulmohsen’s professed extremism.

CBS (12/30/24) coverage of the attack placed suspected mental illness in its headline and lead; it wasn’t until the ninth paragraph that we learned that the suspect “has in the past voiced strongly anti-Islam views and sympathies with the far right in his social media posts,” and showed “anger at Germany for allowing in too many Muslim war refugees and other asylum-seekers.”

NPR’s All Things Considered (12/23/24) began by talking about how the far-right AfD is using the attack to whip up anti-immigrant sentiment ahead of the country’s snap election. It wasn’t until about halfway through that the story acknowledged that police “say, if anything, the suspect claimed, especially on social media, to be an anti-Islamist.”

In other words, coverage of the New Orleans attack centered Jabbar’s professed devotion to ISIS, while coverage of the German attack downplayed Abdulmohsen’s politics, treating them as part of a constellation of factors, including possible mental illness, that could have contributed to the bloodshed.

‘No ill will toward Trump’

A Newsweek headline (1/4/25) declared the Las Vegas attack “not politically motivated”—despite the suspect’s expressed hope that his actions would inspire “military and vets [to] move on DC starting now…to get the Dems out of the fed government.”

The same journalistic approach used in the Magdeburg case was taken when a Tesla Cybertruck exploded outside a Trump hotel in Las Vegas. While that juxtaposition might make it easy to assume that this was some kind of anti-Republican terrorism, that would be incorrect, according to Talking Points Memo (1/4/25): Documents left by Livelsberger, the truck’s driver who died in the blast,

denounce Democrats and demand they be “culled” from Washington, by violence if necessary, and express the hope that his own death will serve as a kind of bell clap for a national rebirth of masculinity under the leadership of Donald Trump, Elon Musk and Bobby Kennedy Jr.

TPM lamented that news headlines “report only that [Livelsberger] warned of national decline and bore ‘no ill will toward Mr. Trump,’ in the words of one of the investigators,” rendering his political motives vague and outside of the central framing.

For example, an AP article (1/3/25) said only that Livelsberger’s “letters covered a range of topics including political grievances, societal problems and both domestic and international issues, including the war in Ukraine,” and that he believed the US was “‘terminally ill and headed toward collapse.’”

ABC‘s report (1/4/25) addressed Livelsberger’s support for the president-elect seven paragraphs in. CNN (1/4/25) gave one line in passing to Livelsberger’s support for Trump, Musk and Kennedy. Using a quote from one former Department of Homeland Security official, Newsweek (1/4/25) declared that the attack in Las Vegas was “not politically motivated.” A piece in The Hill (1/2/25) on “extremism in the military” started by citing Jabbar and Livelsberger as examples, but while it described Jabbar’s Islamacist views, it said only that “less is known about the motivation of Livelsberger.”

Fox News (1/2/25) did acknowledge that Livelsberger’s uncle said of him, “He loved Trump, and he was always a very, very patriotic soldier, a patriotic American,” but it is buried after many other details. Interestingly, it was the New York Post (1/2/25) who directly framed Livelsberger as a super-macho Trump lover, while a long Wall Street Journal piece (1/2/25) on Livelsberger published the same day detailed the man’s personal life with hardly a mention of his political beliefs.

‘War on Christmas’

The Wall Street Journal (1/5/25) tied the German attack into the “war on Christmas” the Murdoch empire has been pushing for two decades.

The US right-wing press was far worse. After the New Orleans attack, Fox News (1/2/25) featured guests who warned that more Islamic terrorism could be on the way, because the attack “could embolden the terrorist organization to radicalize more Americans.”

“It occurred just days after a pro-ISIS outlet called on Muslims to wage Islamic jihad in the US, Europe and Russia,” the right-wing network (1/1/25) reported.

“One obvious message is that the forces of Islamic radicalism haven’t gone away,” the Wall Street Journal editorial board (1/1/25) wrote. “They are still looking for security weaknesses to exploit for mass murder, and the US homeland isn’t safe from foreign-influenced or -planned attacks.”

Meanwhile, Abdulmohsen’s right-wing, anti-Islamic politics didn’t stop the Wall Street Journal (1/5/25) from giving column space to neoconservative pundit Daniel Pipes, who cited the incident in a piece titled “Why Jihadists Wage War on Christmas (and Other Holidays),” with the subhead, “They despise celebrations not sanctioned by Islam, and see Christmas as a crime against Allah.”

The New York Post (1/2/25) did something similar, allowing Douglas Murray—a younger, British version of Pipes—to cite the German attack in a piece called “From College Campuses to Afghanistan, We Let Islamic Terrorism Rise Again.”

It simply didn’t matter to these Murdoch outlets that Abdulmohsen shared Pipes’ and Murray’s politics. He is Saudi and he committed a crime in Europe, therefore he must be the second coming of Osama bin Laden.

Right-wing terror on the rise

Fox News (1/3/25) used the New Orleans attack to chide Democrats for talking about right-wing terrorism—ignoring the Las Vegas attack the next day that aimed to get Americans to “rally around the Trump, Musk, Kennedy.”

Meanwhile, Fox News (1/3/25) used the New Orleans attack to say that the Biden administration had focused too much on right-wing extremism over ISIS threats:

Democrats and liberal media outlets were focused on hyping up terror threats linked to white supremacy while downplaying threats from jihadist terrorist groups like ISIS prior to the New Orleans terrorist attack.

There’s a reason right-wing violence has been in the spotlight, as the Center for Strategic and International Studies (6/17/20) noted a few years ago:

Between 1994 and 2020, there were 893 terrorist attacks and plots in the United States. Overall, right-wing terrorists perpetrated the majority—57%—of all attacks and plots during this period, compared to 25% committed by left-wing terrorists, 15% by religious terrorists, 3% by ethnonationalists, and 0.7% by terrorists with other motives.

The Anti-Defamation League (1/15/23) reported that “right-wing extremist terror incidents in the US have been increasing since the mid-2000s, but the past six years have seen their sharpest rise yet.” The ADL noted that “right-wing terror attacks during this period also resulted in more deaths (58) from such attacks than any of the previous six-year periods since the time of the Oklahoma City bombing,” the white supremacist attack that remains the deadliest domestic terrorist attack in US history.

A report from the National Institute of Justice (1/4/24) said the “number of far-right attacks continues to outpace all other types of terrorism and domestic violent extremism.”

Clearly right-wing political violence remains a threat that requires attention. The handling of the recent vehicle attacks illustrates, however, that corporate media’s instinct is to look away.

 

 

https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin250110.mp3

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New York Times (12/17/24)

This week on CounterSpin: New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman’s December 17 piece, headlined “How Elon Musk and Taylor Swift Can Resolve US-China Relations,” contained some choice Friedmanisms, like:  “More Americans might get a better feel for what is going on there if they simply went and ordered room service at their hotel.” (Later followed quaintly by: “A lot of Chinese have grown out of touch with how China is perceived in the world.”)

But the big idea is that China has taken a “great leap forward in high-tech manufacturing” because of Donald Trump, who a source says “woke them up to the fact that they needed an all-hands-on-deck effort.” And if the US doesn’t respond to China’s “Sputnik” moment the way we did to the Soviet Union, “we will be toast.”

The response has to do with using tariffs on China to “buy time to lift up more Elon Musks” (described as a “homegrown” manufacturer), and for China to “let in more Taylor Swifts”—i.e., chances for its youth to spend money on entertainment made abroad. Secretary of State Tony Blinken evidently “show[ed] China the way forward” last April, when he bought a Swift record on his way to the airport.

OK, it’s Thomas Friedman, but how different is it from US media coverage of China and trade policy generally? We’ll talk about China trade policy with Dean Baker, co-founder and senior economist at the Center for Economic and Policy Research.

https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin250110Baker.mp3

 

Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look back at press coverage of Luigi Mangione.

https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin250110Banter.mp3