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Janine Jackson interviewed Citations Needed‘s Adam Johnson about media in war mode for the June 27, 2025, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

AP (via PBS, 6/26/25)

Janine Jackson: We are recording June 26 in medias res, but AP’s latest gives us enough to start:

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Gen. Dan Caine doubled down Thursday on how destructive the US attacks had been on Iran’s nuclear facilities, and described in detail the study and planning behind the bombing mission, but they stopped short of detailing how much the attack set back the nation’s nuclear program.

We hear also Trump saying, “I’m not happy with Israel because they have broken the ceasefire” that he, we hear, created, adding that Iran and Israel have been fighting “so long and so hard that they don’t know what the fuck they’re doing.” I can’t say that word on the radio, says the FCC, but Trump can say it because—well, you and I don’t know.

The US went to war with Iran last week without congressional, much less public, approval. But most of us only know what we know through corporate news media, and that’s a problem.

Joining us now is Adam Johnson, media analyst and co-host of the podcast Citations Needed. He’s coauthor, with In These Times contributing editor Sarah Lazare, of a couple of recent relevant pieces in In These Times. And he joins us now by phone from Illinois. Welcome back to CounterSpin, Adam Johnson.

Adam Johnson: Thank you for having me.

JJ: So we don’t know what’s going to happen with Iran. Maybe we’re not at war, that would be great, but sadly, we do know what corporate news media will do, because they’ll do what they do. We saw them pull out the playbook, scratch out Iraq, Afghanistan, Eastasia, and write in Iran; or maybe scratch down deeper to get to Iran 1953, and here we go again. It’s many things, but one thing for sure that it is is predictable.

Column (6/22/25)

AJ: So the primary thing that the news media keep doing, pundits and reporters alike, specifically Jake Tapper at CNN, which we wrote about, is they keep saying “nuclear weapons program.” And the goal, generally, is just to put the words “Iran” and “nuclear” in the same sentence, over and over and over again.

The public will largely fill in the blanks, and the media make no effort to even really point out that they, in fact, don’t have a nuclear weapon, or a nuclear weapons program, which is a really important piece of context to know, but it’s almost never mentioned. And this is according to the US intelligence’s own assessment, DNI, CIA, 19 other different intelligence agencies, all came to the same conclusion, and have since 2007.

However, pundits repeatedly say “nuclear weapons program,” but it’s not a nuclear weapons program. And there’s several instances, like I said, of Jake Tapper saying it, several people in Congress have said it. You could say maybe it’s a slip of the tongue by accident, but when basically no one else on CNN but Jake Tapper does it, it doesn’t really seem like an accident; it seems like he’s very clearly making an assertion. Now, if Jake Tapper has access to secret, proprietary intelligence that the CIA doesn’t have, maybe he should tell them?

And what we saw in the buildup to Trump’s bombing of Iran, which we now know was largely theatrical, thank God, was that the sort of ticking time bomb scenario, that he and JD Vance and others were going to the media with, was obviously, by their own admission, and by the New York Times’ own reporting, not based on any new intelligence. It was “a reassessment of old intelligence,” I believe is how the New York Times put it. There’s another name for that: It’s called ideologically motivated bullshit.

But repeatedly, the CIA, which weirdly was pushing back on this, I guess to their credit, in the Wall Street Journal and CNN, was saying, No, no, no, no. Iran’s increased enriched uranium, but it’s just a bargaining chip. It’s a way of getting the US to come to the table so they can relieve these sanctions which have crippled their economy, the only mechanism they plausibly have to do that. But they made no decision. And even if they did make a decision to build a bomb, it would take upwards of three years.

So this is the context that is completely missing or overshadowed, and there’s going to be a poll coming out. I asked one of these progressive polling groups to add it, and I don’t know when it’s going to come out, but what I’d be curious to know is, what percentage of the American public thinks that Iran currently has a nuclear weapon? I suspect it’s probably 70-some odd, 80%.

Because, again, if you say the word “nuclear” and “Iran” over and over again, people are going to have that impression. They don’t believe—why would they have a civilian program? Even though, of course, over 30 countries have a civilian nuclear program but don’t have nuclear weapons; it’s pretty common. And that is just not part of how the public interprets it.

So the public is widely misled on this issue, which, again, gives the impression of some radical cartoon “terrorist” who’s going to blow up Tel Aviv or Manhattan.

New York Times (6/28/25)

Second to that, you have a lot of the New York Times opinion section, for example, rushing to delegitimize the government, citing a very dubious poll saying 80% of Iranians want regime change, when all other polls show the number is probably closer to 40 or 50.

And, of course, how that regime change happens is very contestable; a lot of people hate Trump, but they don’t want China to come bomb us. That’s a totally different claim, right?

You had laundering of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, which is a pro-Israel think tank, you had laundering of their claims that Iran is now housing the head of Al Qaeda. This is all a rehash, word for word, of Iraq War stuff.

So the New York Times was doing its part, as were some other outlets. But for the most part, the White House seems to have wanted a “cool bombing” PR thing. And then what some suspect, and I don’t know, this is just idle speculation, is that Israel was suffering more damage than people knew. And unlike bombing South Lebanon or Gaza,  Iran can actually fight back, and Israel couldn’t sustain or couldn’t maintain its defense posture.

And so they basically used this as a way of getting a ceasefire that they needed anyway. But not by lack of trying on the part of the Washington Post, which actually called for Trump to keep bombing Iran in their editorial board.

FAIR.org (6/23/25)

JJ: There are so many questions that are under the table in this conversation, which is what makes me so upset with media. Media pretend they’re posing questions, and so we’re supposed to imagine that they’ve considered them deeply, but to just draw us back to basics: If the question is, “Should the US bomb Iran?” well, the answer is no, because that’s an overt violation of domestic and international law. The Constitution forbids it, the War Powers Resolution forbids it. But for corporate media, it’s like Bryce Greene just wrote for FAIR.org, the New York Times editorial board says, “America Must Not Rush Into a War Against Iran.” Of course we can do it, but let’s keep it cute, right? These are illegal actions.

AJ: They did the exact same thing in Iraq on March 2003. They published “No War With Iraq,” But if you read it, it says no war until you let the weapons inspectors do their job.

And then in the month prior, they published an editorial in February 2003, saying if Saddam Hussein doesn’t hand over his biological and chemical weapons, that the US has to use military force. Now that’s an argument for war, because of course Saddam Hussein didn’t have biological and chemical weapons.

JJ: So he can’t show them.

New York Times (6/12/25)

AJ: So, yeah, this is the scope of debate. The scope of debate is not, “Is it justified or moral? Why is Israel not a member of the Non-Proliferation Treaty? Why do they not have IAEA inspectors?” There’s this kind of faux-liberal world order narrative.

And that’s why the IAEA report was so powerful. It was a 19 to 16 vote, it was almost along party lines, kind of pro-US/Israel, pro-Russia/pro-China.

And then, quickly, the head of the IAEA says, “Oh, no, no, don’t interpret this as us saying that in any way Iran has made a decision or is somehow accelerating an actual nuclear program.” But that’s not how it was interpreted. Like the New York Times, which had it as a head story the day Israel started bombing Iran, to give it this veneer of liberal rules enforcement, which is obviously absurd, because Israel is not subject to any of these rules. It has an estimated 100 to 300 nukes.

So the scope of debate in these editorials and these opinion sections is not “Do we have any legitimacy to be bombing Iran?” but, “Is bombing Iran the best way to stop them from enriching uranium?” which, again, is entirely within their rights under international law. They have a right to a civilian nuclear program, like any other country does.

JJ: And this is the implicit undergirding of corporate media’s debate, that some countries are “good,” and they can have world-destroying weapons—declared, undeclared, whatever. And some countries are, as Van Jones put it on CNN, “not normal.” Because, if we are looking for “normal,” we got Donald Trump! We got masked agents abducting people off the street…

Adam Johnson: “The scope of debate…is not ‘Do we have any legitimacy to be bombing Iran?’ but ‘Is bombing Iran the best way to stop them from enriching uranium?’”

AJ: And we have the US and Israel openly operating a mass starvation campaign through human genocide, not even euphemism. So I guess this is what normal countries do. They have a daily ritual killing of scores, sometimes hundreds of Palestinians that are desperately lining up for grains of rice and wheat. That’s what normal countries do.

And, again, it’s very weird. There’s this zombie liberal “rules-based order” framing that is still going on, despite the fact that there’s an unfolding genocide that’s lost all pretense of international law. And so there’s this “Oh, the US has to be a policeman and police the world” faux-liberal framework that Trump doesn’t take seriously, Netanyahu doesn’t take seriously, but the media, especially the kind of prestige editorial pages and opinion pages, the New York Times and Washington Post, have to maintain that this is still a thing.

And, of course, people like Van Jones and Jake Tapper at CNN, this idea that there’s normal countries, there’s the goodies and then there’s the baddies. And so even though the goody countries are carrying out this almost cartoon evil, completely removing a people in whole or in part from Earth, and an actual explicit starvation campaign, not even hiding it—that’s what they’re calling it; it’s very weird.

In 2003, when they did this, there was a little more kind of post–Cold War credibility, and now there’s zero. And it’s very strange to watch the vestiges of that framework still go on, regardless of the new facts, and the fact that the majority of Americans think that there’s a genocide going on. No one outside of the Washington Post editorial board and the New York Times editorial board buys any of this shit.

JJ: Exactly. And just, finally, when you try to intervene, you find yourself making arguments at a level that you don’t accept. Like, “Well, they shouldn’t attack Iran’s nuclear capacities, nuclear facilities.” They said “nuclear weapons,” but then they can suck weapons out of it, and they know that it’s still going to be read the same way.

AJ: Yeah, it’s implied.

JJ: And then you also want to say, “Well wait, there’s no evidence of Iran having weaponry.” And then you want to say, “Well, Iran’s allowed to have nuclear weaponry.” And then you have to say, “If we acknowledged Israel’s nuclear weaponry, we wouldn’t legally be allowed to arm them.” So there’s all of these unspoken things, and yet, to silence them is the price of admission to get into “serious people conversation.” And that’s obviously why a lot of people clock out of elite media, because the price of admission is too high.

AJ: It is just not credible, to sit there and talk about international law; you have to have some kind of ostensibly high-minded liberal reason why you’re bombing a country. It’s just not credible, with what we’ve seen over the last two years. It’s very strange. And there’s a kind of think tank/media nexus that has to maintain this fiction, and watching them talk about Iran in such a way that was, again, every kind of terrorist cartoon, every “war on terror” framing, ticking time bomb…. Again, it doesn’t have to make any sense. It’s supposed to just be vaguely racist and vaguely feels true.

But the question in a lot of these panels was like, “What’s the best way to overthrow the regime?” You’d have a liberal on being like, “Well, we need to do the kind of meddling NED stuff and promote groups and this and that, and maybe even arm some ethnic minority groups, and maybe some Kurdish rebels.” And they’re openly just discussing how you overthrow a government.

It’s like, well, OK, so you see them as being illegitimate, can you just provide a list of the legitimate and illegitimate governments for us, and then we can figure out how the US is supposed to take out all the illegitimate ones? The whole thing is so casually chauvinist and casually imperial, they don’t even think about what they’re doing.

JJ: Exactly. Well, where do you see hope, as you are still contributing to media? You believe in journalism; where do you see daylight?

AJ: You know, I don’t. I think social media helps in some ways. Obviously I think it democratized how people receive news coming out of Gaza, but even that’s been manipulated. They see social media CEOs get dragged in front of Congress, and they get disciplined under the auspices of fighting polarization or hate speech or fake news, but it’s all to prevent media that doesn’t fall within that national security directive, quite explicitly.

So I don’t know. I think those algorithms are easily manipulated. I think that the ways in which, even though very few people actually read the New York Times editorial board or watch the Sunday shows, but the ways in which those ideological, agenda-setting institutions still manage to trickle down, and promote seriousness and the concept of seriousness and what is serious and what isn’t, is still very effective. And I don’t really see that changing anytime soon.

JJ: Corporate news media are so many steps removed from human understanding, but they convey so powerfully the air that this is how smart people think. And you can think differently, but that will make you marginal. And even critics are stuck at, like, “don’t drop bombs.” And it becomes this very stale, rehearsed conversation, and we already know where it leads.

And what corporate media won’t do is show the vigor and the work and the intelligence of diplomacy. Media could make peacemaking a heroic effort. Kristi Noem could cosplay as a negotiator. They could sell a different story if they wanted to, is my feeling. So I don’t feel like journalism per se is broken. I feel like it’s being mal-used.

Joy Reid (with Jamie Metzl) on CNN (6/25/25)

AJ: Yeah, I think to the extent to which they have done that, there’s been people saying, “Oh, the Obama deal was working.” And that’s true to an extent, but the Obama deal was still predicated on a totally arbitrary and unfair sanctions regime that is not applied to other countries. But it is correct that it was working, I mean, if one assumes that “working” is Iran not having enriched uranium. So there were some people saying that.

And Joy-Ann Reid I would like to highlight as someone who did a good job pushing back on a lot of the stuff on CNN. She was fired because of her reporting on Gaza at MSNBC. But she’s reappeared as a pundit on CNN to, I guess, play devil’s advocate, as it were. And she’s done a tremendous job, actually, going on CNN and punching down these idiots. That was kind of nice to see. It’s very rare, though. Who knows if they’ll ask her back after that.

But the debate is like, “how much should we sanction Iran?” on the far left end of the spectrum. The other end of the spectrum is “should we go for regime change and kill hundreds of thousands of people?” Instead of saying, well, OK, if we do believe in these high-minded liberal concepts of an international rules-based order, then why don’t we go back to the drawing table and come up with rules, and actually apply them equally? Come up with a system where the US allies and US client states and to a great extent the US—which of course doesn’t sign a bunch of different treaties, cluster munitions, the ICC, the International Criminal Court—why don’t we come up with an actual rules-based order, instead of just whatever the US State Department and its buddies in Tel Aviv and Riyadh think?

That would be something that would maybe be worth pursuing, but it’s not. It’s this kind of weird, zombie, fake-consistent order, where if you’re deemed as being hostile to US and Israeli and Saudi security architecture in the Middle East, you are seen as per se ontologically evil, and in urgent need of disciplining, and in urgent need of either regime change or bombing or crippling sanctions that ruin your economy.

And that’s just taken for granted. And this is not particularly liberal or very thoughtful or very worldly. It’s knee jerk. It’s chauvinist. It’s obviously oftentimes racist, and that’s what narrows the debate. There’s no sense that we should apply any of these standards to any other country.

JJ: All right then. Well, we’ll end there for now. We’ve been speaking with media analyst Adam Johnson. He’s co-host, with Nima Shirazi, of the podcast Citations Needed. His substack is called the Column, and his work on Iran and other issues, co-authored with Sarah Lazare, can be found at InTheseTimes.com. Thank you so much, Adam Johnson, for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

AJ: Thank you.

Zohran Mamdani to Kristen Welker (Meet the Press, 6/29/25): “Freedom and justice and safety are things that, to have meaning, have to be applied to all people, and that includes Israelis and Palestinians as well.”

Meet the Press host Kristen Welker (6/29/25) showed courage by interviewing Zohran Mamdani, the winner of the Democratic mayoral primary for New York, after he’d been widely attacked by corporate media. But unfortunately, she fell into a trap that has been set repeatedly in recent months to smear Mamdani. She asked him to condemn the phrase “globalize the intifada,” claiming—without offering evidence—that the term “intifada” refers to “violence against Jews.”

I doubt Welker is an Arabic linguist. But as a Palestinian journalist who covered the Intifada and helped introduce the term to Western media, I am appalled by this misrepresentation. Not only is the translation wrong, it’s an insult to the thousands of New York Jews who voted for Mamdani.

For the record, intifada translates to “shake off.” Palestinians used the term to describe their popular resistance against an Israeli occupation of their land that had no end in sight. It emerged amid a steady expansion of illegal settlements, which were systematically turning the occupied territories into a Swiss cheese–like landscape, precisely designed to prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state.

As someone who reported on the Intifada and explained its meaning to international audiences, I can say unequivocally: Intifada was used by Palestinian activists to describe a civil resistance movement rooted in dignity and national self-determination.

The Arabic-language version of the website of the US Holocaust Museum translated the Warsaw Ghetto “Uprising” as “Intifada”—until blogger Juan Cole (5/1/24) pointed this out. (Creative Commons photo: Phil Kalina.)

Let’s begin with the word’s literal meaning. As noted, in Arabic, intifada simply means “shaking off.” Since many—including Jewish leaders, Christian Zionists and GOP officials—have distorted the peaceful intentions behind the word, I turned to a source that might resonate more clearly with people of faith: the Bible.

In the Arabic version of the Old Testament, the word intifada appears three times, both as a noun and a verb. Looking at its English equivalents in the New International Version (though other translations are similar) offers enlightening context:

• Judges 16:20: “Samson awoke from his sleep and thought, ‘I’ll go out as before and shake myself free.’”
• Isaiah 52:2: “Shake off your dust; rise up, sit enthroned, Jerusalem. Free yourself from the chains on your neck, Daughter Zion, now a captive.”
• Psalm 109:23: “I fade away like an evening shadow; I am shaken off like a locust.”

Each of these examples uses the term intifada—shaking off oppression, captivity or anguish—as a metaphor for liberation, not violence.

While Google Translate and other modern tools often render intifada as “popular uprising,” its literal meaning—“to shake off”—captures the spirit with which Palestinians adopted the term. When they launched the first Intifada in 1987—after 20 years under a foreign military occupation—it was an expression of a desire to wake up, rise and throw off the chains of subjugation. It is not inherently antisemitic, nor does it refer by default to terrorism or violence.

While accompanying international journalists covering the protests, I often discussed this with them. In Jerusalem, I explained to LA Times bureau chief Dan Fisher, the  Washington Post’s Glenn Frankel and the New York Times’ John Kifner what Palestinians meant by the word. I told them that throughout Palestinian patriotic literature and slogans, two distinctions were always made: The Intifada was a protest against the Israeli occupation, not against Jews or the existence of Israel, and that the ultimate goal was to achieve an independent Palestinian state alongside Israel.

Fisher, Frankel and Kifner included these clarifications in their reports, helping the Arabic term intifada enter the global lexicon with its intended meaning.

To define “intifada,” Fox News (5/23/25) brought on Douglas Murray, who calls Islam an “infection” and declares that “all immigration into Europe from Muslim countries must stop.”

But today, as protests against Israel’s devastating war on Gaza mount, the word is being twisted. When Rep. Elise Stefanik grilled the presidents of UPenn, Harvard, and MIT in December 2023 about pro-Palestinian chants invoking “intifada,” she equated the term with “genocide of Jews.”

The university presidents faltered. They should have said clearly: Genocide against Jews—or any people—is abhorrent. But intifada is not synonymous with genocide. To equate a call to end the Israeli military occupation with a call for genocide or violence against Jews is a gross distortion—a bizarre reversal that paints the victims as aggressors.

And yet this distortion persists. [Gillibrand] Former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo labeled Mamdani antisemitic. Anti-Defamation League CEO Jonathan Greenblatt—who likely doesn’t speak Arabic—claimed on X that intifada is “explicit incitement to violence.” Rep. Dan Goldman (D-N.Y.) added that the word is “well understood to refer to the violent terror attacks.” Sen. Kristen Gillibrand (D-N.Y.) told WNYC public radio (6/26/25), “The global intifada is a statement that means destroy Israel and kill all the Jews.”

Media echoed the politicians’ misrepresentations of intifada. “Many Jews see it as a call to violence against Israeli civilians,” ABC (6/29/25) reported. “Many Jews consider it a call to violence, a nod to deadly attacks on civilians in Israel by Palestinians in uprisings in the 1980s and 2000s,” wrote the New York Times (6/25/25). Of course, “many Jews” do not hear the word that way—but the more important question is, what is the accurate understanding of the word as used by Palestinians?

Fox News (5/23/25) didn’t mince words: “‘Intifada’ Means Bringing Terror to the Streets of America,” it said in a headline, citing notorious Islamophobe Douglas Murray. To the New York Times‘ Bret Stephens (7/1/25), “What Intifada Really Means” is “giving moral comfort to people who deliberately murder innocent Jews.”

Even liberal podcast host Donny Deutsch repeated the same claim while speaking on MSNBC (Morning Joe, 6/30/25):

I’m outraged that we have a candidate for mayor of New York, Mr. Mamdani, that cannot walk back or cannot condemn the words “globalize the intifada” and his nuance of, “Well, it means different things for different people.” Well, let me tell you what it means to a Jew—it means violence.

The First Intifada in the Gaza Strip, December 21, 1987 (photo: Efi Sharir).

The first Intifada embraced principles of nonviolent resistance championed by Martin Luther King Jr. and Mahatma Gandhi. My cousin, Mubarak Awad, who established the Palestinian Center for the Study of Nonviolence, encouraged boycotts of Israeli products, labor strikes and grassroots economic development in preparation for statehood. He translated, printed and distributed Arabic translations of Gene Sharp’s writings on nonviolence throughout the occupied territories. Mubarak was deported on the eve of the Intifada by then–Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir.

After Shamir came Yitzhak Rabin, who called publicly to “break the bones” of Palestinian stone throwers. During the first Intifada, Israeli soldiers and settlers responded to the nonfatal protests with extreme violence. In the first phase of the uprising—a little more than a year—332 Palestinians were killed, along with 12 Israelis (Middle East Monitor, 12/8/16).

This brutality did not suppress the protests, but merely escalated the violence: At the end of six years, more than 1,500 Palestinians, including more than 300 children, and 400 Israelis—18 of whom were children—were dead, according to the Israeli human rights group B’tselem.

The same pattern recurred in the second Intifada: Only after the initial protests were met with massively disproportionate force did Palestinians, led by Hamas, turn to suicide bombing as a desperation tactic (Al Jazeera, 9/28/20). To treat the response to the brutal suppression of protest as though it represented the essential nature of intifada is intellectually lazy and politically cynical.

Zohran Mamdani never used the words “global intifada.” But he refused to denounce calls for the world to wake up and speak out against atrocities in Gaza. His victory in the Democratic primary—supported in part by Jewish New Yorkers—shows he is neither antisemitic nor willing to renounce an Arabic word that has been hijacked and misused by people who would rather Palestinians remain silent and submissive under occupation.

Research assistance: Shirlynn Chan

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(photo: Jim Naureckas)

This week on CounterSpin: White supremacy, Islamophobia and antisemitism are irreducible dangers in themselves. They are also tools that powerful, wealthy people take up to protect their power and wealth, and to deflect everyone’s attention from who is, actually, day to day, threatening all of our well-being. That brazenness (everything is in peril!)—and that skullduggery (you know who’s the problem? your different-looking neighbor!)—are both in evidence in corporate media’s hellbent, throw-it-all-at-the-wall campaign against democratic socialist New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani.

We’ll talk about how elite news media are Trojan-horsing their hatred for any ideas that threaten their ill-gotten gains, via very deep, very serious “concerns” about Mamdani as a person, with Jeff Cohen and Norman Solomon, longtime political activists, writers and co-founders of the emphatically nonpartisan group RootsAction.

Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at recent press coverage of Gaza massacres.

Aggression is widely understood as the most serious form of the illegal use of force under international law. At the post–World War II Nuremberg Trials, British Judge Norman Birkett said:

To initiate a war of aggression…is not only an international crime; it is the supreme international crime, differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.

UN General Assembly Resolution 3314 lists seven acts that constitute aggression, including:

• The invasion or attack by the armed forces of a state of the territory of another State….
• Bombardment by the armed forces of a state against the territory of another state, or the use of any weapons by a state against the territory of another state.

In a clear instance of such aggression, 125 US military aircraft (along with a submarine) unleashed 75 weapons against Iran on June 21, including 14 GBU-57 Massive Ordnance Penetrators (MOPs), each of which weighs 30,000 pounds (BBC, 6/23/25). The MOPs are the most powerful non-nuclear weapons in the US arsenal (Democracy Now!, 6/23/25).

The New York Times‘ Bret Stephens (6/22/25) acknowledged that US intelligence maintained that “Iran’s leaders had not yet decided to build a bomb”—but he argued that to act “amid uncertainty…is the essence of statesmanship.”

Rather than condemning this blatant violation of international law, US corporate media commentators gushed over what the Boston Globe (6/24/25) called a “brilliant military operation.” The Wall Street Journal (6/22/25) gave President Donald Trump “credit…for meeting the moment.”

To the New York Times’ Bret Stephens (6/22/25), Trump made “a courageous and correct decision that deserves respect.” “The president acted before it was too late,” he wrote. “It is the essence of statesmanship.”

For the Washington Post’s Max Boot (6/25/25), it’s “good news…that both Israel and the United States showed they can bombard Iranian nuclear facilities and other targets at will.”

Rather than toasting aggression, these observers could have used their platforms to try to help foster a political climate that prioritizes peace and the international legal principles that could help create a less violent world.

Meanwhile, some opinion mongers thought the US was at risk of insufficiently violating international law. The Post’s editorial board (6/22/25) said Trump

should ensure that Iran’s nuclear program is demolished, as he appeared to claim it was on Saturday. This would mean the destruction of the targeted sites plus any residual weapons-building capacity.

In other words, the authors are glad that the US bombed Iran in violation of international law, and think it might be best to do more of the same.

A Journal editorial (6/23/25) put forth a similar view, warning that Trump will “squander” any “gains” that the US and Israel may have made against Iran if he “lets Iran take a breather, retain any enriched uranium it has secretly stored, and then rearm. But the last fortnight creates a rare opportunity for a more peaceful Middle East.” I’m not a big Orwell fan, but there’s something to his vision of the propaganda slogan “war is peace.”

Iran “now knows Mr. Trump isn’t bluffing,” the Wall Street Journal (6/22/25) wrote. Does the paper imagine that Iran thought Trump was “bluffing” when he assassinated Qasem Soleimani, the nation’s top military leader, in 2020?

These celebrations of bomb-dropping occur in an upside-down world, where Iran is an aggressor against the United States. One form of this lie is accusing Iran of wantonly killing Americans or seeking to do so. The Journal (6/22/25) cited “1,000 Americans killed by Iran-supplied roadside bombs and other means”—referring to the dubious claim that Iran is responsible for US soldiers killed during the illegal invasion and occupation of Iraq (Progressive, 1/7/20). Thus, to the editors, “Mr. Trump had to act to stop the threat in front of him to protect America.”

For Boot (6/22/25), Iran is a “predator” that the United States and Israel “will still have to deal with…for years to come.”

It would be nice to be able to assess the evidence for these allegations, but the authors don’t so much as hint at any. What is well documented, though, is that the US has been the aggressor in its longrunning war with Iran.

The US ruling class initiated the conflict by overthrowing Iran’s democratically elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh in 1953 (NPR, 2/7/19), propping up the Shah’s torture regime for 26 years (BBC, 6/3/16; AP, 2/6/19), sponsoring the Iraqi invasion of Iran and helping Iraq use chemical weapons against Iran (Foreign Policy, 8/26/13), supporting Israel’s years-long campaign of murdering Iranian scientists (Responsible Statecraft, 12/21/20), and asphyxiating Iran’s civilian population through economic sanctions (Human Rights Watch, 10/29/19).

In other words, the US has been prosecuting a war against the Iranian people for more than 70 years, and Iran hasn’t done anything remotely comparable to the US, but the corporate media pretends that the inverse is true.

The consent manufacturers went even further, characterizing Iran as a threat to the world more generally. The Journal (6/22/25) said “Iran has been waging regional and terrorist war for decades,” and that “the world is safer” because the US bombed the country. Stephens proclaimed the Iranian government “the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism,” a claim Boot (6/25/25) echoed, writing that the nation has a “decades-long track record as the No. 1 state sponsor of terrorism.” Sickeningly, Antony Blinken (New York Times, 6/24/25), a leading architect of the genocide of Gaza’s civilian population, called Iran “a leading state sponsor of terrorism; a destructive and destabilizing force via its proxies in Lebanon, Syria, Gaza, Yemen and Iraq.”

As usual, none of these writers bothered to say which acts of “terrorism” Iran has backed, never mind provide proof. Of course, if one wanted to make a serious argument that Iran has won the planet’s “state sponsor of terrorism” gold medal, then it would be necessary to show how they trumped, say, US support for Al Qaeda in Syria. For such a case to be convincing, it would furthermore be necessary to assess where bankrolling a genocide ranks in the terror-sponsoring Olympics.

Max Boot (Washington Post, 6/25/25): “The good news is that both Israel and the United States showed they can bombard Iranian nuclear facilities and other targets at will.”

In the fantasy world where Iran is a grave danger to the US and indeed the world, then wrongly implying that it has or is about to have nuclear weapons packs a heavier punch. The Journal (6/22/25) said, “President Trump’s decision to strike Iran’s three most significant nuclear sites on Saturday helped rid the world of a grave nuclear threat.” The editorial would later add, “Ayatollah Ali Khamenei wanted a bomb more than peace.”

Boot (6/25/25) wrote that “preliminary Israeli intelligence assessments [of the US bombing of Iran] conclude that the damage to the Iranian nuclear weapons program was more extensive—enough to set back the program by several years.” Stephens began his piece:

For decades, a succession of American presidents pledged that they were willing to use force to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons. But it was President Trump who, by bombing three of Iran’s key nuclear sites on Sunday morning, was willing to demonstrate that those pledges were not hollow and that Tehran could not simply tunnel its way to a bomb because no country other than Israel dared confront it.

As FAIR contributor Bryce Greene (6/23/25) recently demonstrated, there is no proof that Iran has nuclear weapons or is close to having any. Yet the op-ed pages are peppered with insinuations that Iran’s imaginary nukes legitimize the US’s aggression against the country.

A Boston Globe editorial (6/24/25) read:

After years of insisting it would not allow Iran to acquire a nuclear weapon, Israel followed through by launching a wide-ranging attack earlier this month, assassinating nuclear scientists and military leaders and destroying many sites associated with Iran’s decades-long nuclear program. Trump initially stayed on the sidelines, until Saturday when US bombers delivered the coup de grâce, destroying—or at least heavily damaging—a key underground site that only American bunker-buster bombs could reach….

Stopping Iran, whose unofficial national motto is “Death to America,’’ from gaining a nuclear weapon has rightly been a US priority for decades.

Iran’s nuclear program is now damaged but not destroyed.

What’s missing from this chatter is that, even if we lived in an alternate reality where Iran had nuclear weapons or was hours away from having them, attacking them on these grounds would not be legitimate. After all, international law does not grant states a right to attack each other on a preventive (Conversation, 6/18/25) or pre-emptive basis (Conversation, 6/23/25). This crucial point was entirely absent in the coverage I’ve discussed.

Also overlooked are the 90 nuclear warheads that Israel is believed to have, as well as the more than 5,200 that the US reportedly possesses, none of which apparently constitute “a grave nuclear threat,” even as it’s not Iran but the US and Israel that routinely carry out full-scale invasions and occupations of nations in West Asia.

Whether it’s Iran’s supposed support for terrorism or Iran’s nonexistent and non-imminent nuclear weapons, the propaganda follows the same formula: make an unsubstantiated claim about Iranian malfeasance, and use that as a premise on which to defend Washington openly carrying out acts of aggression, perhaps the gravest violation of international law.

If you want the US and Israel to stop killing and immiserating people in Iran, remember this pattern and get used to debunking it. Because, last week’s ceasefire notwithstanding, the US/Israeli war on Iran isn’t over.

White House press secretary Bill Moyers in 1965.

Bill Moyers died last week at the age of 91. His career began as a close aide to President Lyndon B. Johnson, serving as LBJ’s de facto chief of staff and then his press secretary, but Moyers spent most of his life in journalism. After the Johnson administration, he was briefly publisher of Long Island’s Newsday, which won two Pulitzers under his tenure before he was forced out for being too left (Extra!, 1–2/96).

Most of Moyers’ journalism, however, appeared on public television, an institution he helped launch as a member of the 1967 Carnegie Commission, which called for public TV to be “a forum for controversy and debate” that would  “provide a voice for groups in the community that may otherwise be unheard” and “help us see America whole, in all its diversity.”

While public TV as a whole has often failed to live up to those ideas, Moyers exemplified them.

Bill Moyers (The Secret Government, 1987): “Can we have the permanent warfare state and democracy too?”

Moyers was a consistently critical voice on PBS. In 1987, his PBS special The Secret Government: The Constitution in Crisis offered a searing examination of the Iran/Contra scandal; he followed that up with an even deeper dive into the story three years later for Frontline with High Crimes and Misdemeanors.

Moyers’ 2007 documentary Buying the War, aired four years into the Iraq War, offered a critique of media failures in the run-up to war that was rarely heard in corporate media.

His independence made him a thorn in PBS‘s side. Robert Parry (FAIR.org, 9/13/11) explained:

When I was working at PBS Frontline in the early 1990s, senior producers would sometimes order up pre-ordained right-wing programs—such as a show denouncing Cuba’s Fidel Castro—to counter Republican attacks on the documentary series for programs the right didn’t like, such as Bill Moyers’ analysis of the Iran/Contra scandal.

In essence, the idea was to inject right-wing bias into some programming as “balance” to other serious journalism, which presented facts that Republicans found objectionable. That way, the producers could point to the right-wing show to prove their “objectivity” and, with luck, deter GOP assaults on PBS funding.

When Moyers hosted the news program Now (2002-04), the right complained—and PBS addressed the complaints by cutting the hour-long show to 30 minutes, while adding three right-wing programs: Tucker Carlson: Unfiltered, a show by conservative commentator Michael Medved and the Journal Editorial Report, featuring writers and editors from the arch-conservative Wall Street Journal editorial page (FAIR.org, 9/17/04).

Moyers was already heading out the door at Now, passing the torch to co-host David Brancaccio, who largely continued its hard-hitting tradition. Moyers returned to PBS in 2007 with a revival of his 1970s public affairs show, Bill Moyers Journal. When he retired that show in 2010, PBS also canceled Now. Moyers’ brand of independent journalism has been in short supply on PBS ever since.

Moyers diagnosed the problem in an appearance on Democracy Now! (6/8/11):

Sometimes self-censorship occurs because you’re looking over your shoulder, and you think, well, if I do this story or that story, it will hurt public broadcasting. Public broadcasting has suffered often for my sins, reporting stories the officials don’t want reported. And today, only…a very small percentage of funding for NPR and PBS comes from the government. But that accounts for a concentration of pressure and self-censorship. And only when we get a trust fund, only when the public figures out how to support us independently of a federal treasury, will we flourish as an independent medium.

Bill Moyers on Tavis Smiley (5/12/11): “Voices that challenge the ruling ideology…get constantly pushed back to the areas of the stage you can’t see or hear.”

Moyers shared FAIR’s critique of corporate media. On Tavis Smiley (5/13/11), he spoke about the elite bias in the media:

Television, including public television, rarely gives a venue to people who have refused to buy into the ruling ideology of Washington. The ruling ideology of Washington is we have two parties, they do their job, they do their job pretty well. The differences between them limit the terms of the debate. But we know that real change comes from outside the consensus. Real change comes from people making history, challenging history, dissenting, protesting, agitating, organizing.

Those voices that challenge the ruling ideology—two parties, the best of all worlds, do a pretty good job—those voices get constantly pushed back to the areas of the stage you can’t see or hear.

Jeff Cohen, FAIR’s founder, remembered Moyers’ impact on FAIR:

He was very supportive of FAIR from day one, and always offered encouragement to our staff. He was especially supportive of our studies of who gets to speak on PBS and NPR, and who doesn’t. He helped FAIR find funding for quarter-page advertorials on the New York Times op-ed page, which was then crucial and well-read media real estate, on various issues of corporate media bias or censorship. And he helped us find funding as well for a full-page ad in USA Today, exposing the distortions and lies of Rush Limbaugh.

Already some in corporate media are trying to push Moyers’ dissenting voice to the shadows. The New York Times (6/26/25), in a lengthy obituary devoted mostly to Moyers’ time working with LBJ, found no room to mention Moyers’ Iran/Contra work, or his repeated clashes with and criticisms of PBS. It did, however, find space to quote far-right website FrontPageMag.com, which in 2004 called Moyers a “sweater-wearing pundit who delivered socialist and neo-Marxist propaganda with a soft Texas accent.”

Featured Image: Bill Moyers at Arizona State University, 2017 (Creative Commons photo: Gage Skidmore)

The Sunday morning talkshows have for decades played an important part in shaping political narratives in the United States. They typically bring on high-profile Washington guests for one-on-one interviews, aiming to set the political agenda for the week ahead. But these shows also have consistently marginalized the voices of women and BIPOC people, and those who might represent the public interest, rather than the interests of a narrow, wealthy elite (Extra!, 9–10/01, 4/12).

After Donald Trump was declared the winner of the 2016 and 2024 elections, the Sunday shows had an opportunity to hold up both his campaign promises and his cabinet picks to scrutiny. With his campaigns’ racist attacks on immigrants and diversity initiatives, as well as his movement’s assaults on the rights of women and trans people, inviting guests who more accurately reflect the diversity of the country would seem to be a journalistic imperative. Yet a new FAIR study finds that the Sunday shows’ coverage of the Trump transitions were even more heavily white and male than usual.

We also found that in 2024, when Trump’s rhetoric and cabinet picks became even more extreme, fewer guests voiced criticism of Trump and his cabinet than in 2016. By downplaying critiques of Trump, these shows used their inside-the-Beltway influence to tell insiders that the MAGA presidency should get a more deferential reception the second time around.

FAIR documented all guests on ABC‘s This Week, CBS‘s Face the Nation, CNN‘s State of the Union, Fox News Sunday and NBC‘s Meet the Press from November 13, 2016, through January 22, 2017, and from November 10, 2024, through January 19, 2025. We used the Nexis news database, Archive.org and news outlet websites to obtain complete transcripts. We included all guests invited to speak on the show with the host, whether individually or in groups. (Most panel discussions—which were typically journalist roundtables—were excluded; the exceptions were those conducted in an interview format.)

We documented the guests’ occupation, gender and race or ethnicity, as well as whether they voiced critical or supportive opinions of Trump, his campaign and his cabinet picks. For politicians and other political professionals, we recorded partisan affiliation.

We counted 162 guests in the first Trump transition period, and 186 in the second. (Much of the difference can be accounted for by the fact that Christmas fell on a Sunday in 2016, resulting in only three guests across all shows, rather than the usual 15 to 17.)

From the first to the second transition period, there were some notable shifts in the shows’ guest demographics and views on the president-elect, particularly from nonpartisan guests and guests from the defeated Democratic Party.

The vast majority of guests in both time periods were current and former government officials, in line with the Sunday shows’ focus on Washington insiders. This habit has the effect of marginalizing other kinds of people with deep knowledge about various policy areas, such as academics, NGO leaders, labor leaders, activists or other public interest voices.

In 2016, current and former US officials and politicians made up 86% of all guest appearances. In 2024–25, that number stayed nearly the same, at 84%. In 2016, journalists came in a distant second, at 7%. In 2024, that distinction went to former military officials, with 6%.

Of the partisan sources, Republicans outnumbered Democrats (and independents who caucused with the Democrats) 56% to 40% in 2016–17. Interestingly, Democrats slightly outnumbered Republicans in 2024–25, 49% to 47%. (The remainder were primarily people who had served as appointees under both Republican and Democratic administrations, and one Green Party guest in 2016.)

Historically, Republicans have been overrepresented on the Sunday shows. It’s noteworthy that that wasn’t the case in the transition to the second Trump administration. But at the same time, the number of invited guests who voiced criticism of Trump or his cabinet picks decreased from 2016 to 2024, from 28% to 22%. This can be largely attributed to the fact that far fewer of the Sunday shows’ Democratic guests and nonpartisan guests took a critical position on Trump in 2024—a phenomenon that will be discussed in more detail below.

The Sunday show guests were highly skewed toward men (81% of guests) in 2016; they were even more skewed (84%) in 2024. This was driven primarily by the shift in GOP guests, whose 3.5:1 male-to-female ratio in 2016 skyrocketed to an astounding 24:1 ratio in 2024. (Trump’s 2016 campaign manager Kellyanne Conway accounted for 15 of the 17 female GOP appearances in the first time period.)

Not every Sunday show guest talked about Trump; other interview topics ranged from political issues, like Middle East policy or the opioid epidemic, to largely apolitical interviews about things like sports or books. In 2024–25, there were 19 of these guests, and they were nearly evenly split along gender lines—meaning the gender split among those talking about Trump was even more skewed towards men.

Fox News was consistently the worst in this category, inviting 89% male guests in 2016 and 90% in 2024, but most of the others weren’t far behind. The high mark in female representation for any show in the study was CNN in 2016, when just 27% of its guests were women. In 2024, CBS bucked the trend as the only show that increased its female representation, moving from 20% to 25%, and also was the only show to invite a trans guest (Rep. Sarah McBride, 11/24/24) during either study period.

In other words, as Trump retook office under the shadow of Project 2025, with its promises to reverse decades of gains on gender equity and reproductive rights, nearly every show moved toward a greater silencing of women’s voices.

Marginalizing women’s voices is consequential. For instance, State of the Union host Jake Tapper (1/5/25) directed questions about Trump nominee Pete Hegseth to two white male guests, Republican Sen. Jim Banks and Democratic Sen. Mark Kelly. Asked directly by Tapper about the sexual assault claim against Hegseth, Banks waved it off; the only “concerns” Kelly expressed were about Hegseth’s lack of experience.

When CBS Face the Nation (11/24/24) asked similar questions of Democrat Sen. Tammy Duckworth, she responded directly: “It’s frankly an insult and really troubling that Mr. Trump would nominate someone who has admitted that he’s paid off a victim who has claimed rape allegations against him.” Female guests won’t always raise issues of women’s rights, gender equity or misogyny, nor should they be expected to shoulder that responsibility alone—but they are certainly more likely to.

The shows also invited overwhelmingly white guests to interview, though that number decreased from 2016 to 2024, from 85% to 78%. While not quite as extreme an overrepresentation as gender, the percentage of white guests still far exceeded their proportion among the general public: In 2024, 58% of the US population identified as non-Hispanic white, down from 62% in 2016.

From 2016 to 2024, Black representation on the Sunday shows decreased from 10% to 5%, while Asian-American guests increased, from less than 1% to 8%. This increase was in part due to repeat appearances by Democrats Duckworth and Rep. Ro Khanna. GOP guests also increased in diversity, due largely to four appearances by Republican Sen. Markwayne Mullin, a member of the Cherokee Nation.

During the 2024–25 time period, neither CBS nor CNN invited any Black guests, and Fox invited no Latine guests, as the Trump team geared up for Day One attacks on anti-racism initiatives and on immigrant communities.

In 2016, then–Rep. Keith Ellison (D–Minn.) said of Trump on ABC (11/13/16):

We oppose his misogyny. We oppose his picking on people of different ethnic and religious groups. And we want to be making clear that if he tries to deliver on his word, that we will be there to say no.

Ellison appeared the next week on CBS (11/20/16), similarly decrying Trump’s “racism, misogyny,” and declaring, “It’s hard to normalize that, and we can never do it.” But eight years later, that racism and misogyny were repeatedly normalized by Sunday show guests—mostly of the white male variety.

Guestlists are not entirely determined by the shows themselves, as administrations choose who to make available as guests, and not every invited guest will agree to appear. Because shows lean so heavily on congressmembers for guest interviews, they also draw from a pool that is demographically skewed (76% non-Hispanic white, 72% male). But the Sunday shows clearly aren’t making any effort to offer voices more representative of the US population, tilting even further white and male than Congress does.

When a guest spoke about Trump, his campaign or his cabinet picks, FAIR coded those comments as positive, neutral or critical. We defined those who praised Trump, his cabinet picks or his policy positions (as opposed to general Republican positions) as positive; those who do not take an explicit stance on these as neutral; and those who disparaged these as critical. Statements about Trump’s opponents, like Vice President Kamala Harris or Sen. Hillary Clinton, were not considered unless they also included specific references to Trump. The balance of these comments changed markedly between the first and second Trump transitions—particularly among Democratic and nonpartisan guests.

Overall, guest interviews became more neutral in the second transition. In 2016–17, 94% of guests made comments about Trump, and in 2024–25, 90% did so. But in the first transition, 30% of those guests spoke critically, while in the second, only 24% were critical. Neutral takes rose from 19% of sources to 28%. Nearly half the guests who commented on Trump had positive things to say in both transitions: 51% in the first, 48% in the second. It’s notable that there was a marked shift toward neutrality among guests, even as Trump’s rhetoric and cabinet picks became more extreme.

This was particularly noteworthy among those Democratic guests (and independents who caucused with Democrats) who made comments about Trump. In 2016–17, the combined Democratic and independent guests’ comments about Trump were critical 62% of the time, and only 4% of such comments were positive. In contrast, in 2024–25, when far more such guests were invited to appear, only 49% spoke critically, while 11% spoke positively. Trump-related commentary from Democrats shifted from 35% to 40% neutral.

Senators, who make up a large portion of partisan guests, didn’t shift their perspectives much between the years, from 63% to 62% critical. Representatives tilted a little more neutral, but the biggest shift can be seen in which Democrats the Sunday shows invited: more former White House officials in 2016–17 (10, vs. 4 in the second transition), and more officials of the current/outgoing White House in 2024–25 (13, vs. five in the first).

All the guests representing the outgoing administration were either neutral or voiced support for Trump. Meanwhile, in the first time period, seven of the critical Democratic interviews about Trump (and three of the neutrals) were from former presidential appointees. Only three former appointees were asked about Trump in the second transition—all of whom were critical.

It’s predictable that former officials, who are not representing the current White House team that is seeking a smooth transition, feel more free to speak critically. For instance, Norm Eisen, a former special counsel on ethics to Barack Obama, spoke to This Week (12/11/16) about Trump’s conflicts of interest, predicting, “He’s going to be tainted by scandal.”

In contrast, Biden national security adviser Jake Sullivan offered a more flattering perspective (NBC Meet the Press, 12/1/24):

First I would just say that we’ve had good consultations with the incoming team. We’ve been transparent with them. We are committed to ensuring a smooth transition. Second, I’m glad to see the incoming team is welcoming the ceasefire.

Interestingly, Republican guests also trended slightly more toward neutral comments in the second transition period. Five Republicans (6%) spoke about Trump critically in the first time period, while only three (4%) did so in the second. At the same time, the percentage of Republicans making pro-Trump comments dipped from 87% to 84%. GOP guests making neutral comments increased from 6% to 12%.

Nonpartisan guests, who accounted for 15% of guests in both time periods, shifted even more markedly: Half of those who made comments about Trump expressed criticism in 2016–17, and none did so in 2024–25. Meanwhile, positive comments increased from 21% to 50%.

The types of guests dominating this category also changed: In 2016, the largest group consisted of journalists invited for one-on-one interviews (8); these often made critical remarks about Trump, as when the Washington Post‘s David Ignatius told Face the Nation (12/18/16), “I was struck…by his reluctance to do what typically happens in national security matters, which is seek some kind of bipartisan unified consensus.” Or when the New York Times‘ Dean Baquet said to Meet the Press (1/1/17), “I think that there are a lot of question marks about Donald Trump.”

In 2024, there was only one journalist (radio host Charlamagne tha God—This Week, 11/12/24), while business elites (4) and foreign diplomats (3) dominated.

As one might expect, diplomats tended to express more enthusiasm for the incoming president. “I know they share our goal of wanting to have security and stability,” British Ambassador Karen Pierce said of the incoming Trump administration (Face the Nation, 11/10/24). Ukrainian Ambassador Oksana Markarova told Face the Nation (12/15/24): “Let me thank President Trump. He is the one who made a historic decision…to provide us with lethal aid in the first place.”

Business leaders likewise tended to praise Trump. “The American consumer today, as well as corporate America, is quite excited about what the Trump administration is talking about,” IBM vice chair Gary Cohn—a Trump advisor—told Face the Nation (12/15/24). OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said to Fox News Sunday (12/1/24): “We need to be able to have the best AI infrastructure in the world….. I believe President-elect Trump will be very good at that.”

With Trump’s threats of retribution a major factor in the second transition, it’s not necessarily surprising that partisan guests might be more wary of voicing criticism—which is all the more reason for the Sunday shows to look outside their usual suspects. Instead, the few nonpartisan guests they invited came from occupations much more likely to say flattering things of the incoming president in order to curry favor.

Research assistance: Wilson Korik, Emma Llano

They tried. Oh, did the media try.

The declared victory for Zohran Mamdani, a democratic socialist, in the Democratic primary for New York City mayor highlights many things. The power of his campaign, the popularity of his ideas, the importance of grassroots get-out-the-vote mobilization, and the tepid reception for Andrew Cuomo, who resigned as the state’s governor due to a myriad of sexual harassment allegations, all contributed to the surprising—to corporate media, anyway—result.

Earlier this month, FAIR’s Raina Lipsitz (6/13/25) responded to a New York profile (5/20/25) that attempted to undermine Mamdani’s record. In the home stretch of the primary race in the latter half of June, the pressure against Mamdani increased, featuring thoughtless dismissals of his ideas, selective memory and factual inaccuracy in the service of lowering Mamdani’s electoral chances.

That Mamdani emerged from this mess victorious exposes the out-of-touchness of establishment media outlets that twisted like pretzels to scare voters away from the 33-year-old phenomenon. (Readers should know that I ranked Mamdani first in the primary and contributed to his campaign. I’m not unbiased when it comes to who I want to see as mayor, but the analysis of the media that follows, I believe, will withstand scrutiny.)

The New York Times‘ attack (6/16/25) on Zohran Mamdani was accompanied by an image centered on the World Trade Center.

The New York Times editorial board (6/16/25) argued that “Mr. Mamdani is running on an agenda uniquely unsuited to the city’s challenges.” They explained:

He is a democratic socialist who too often ignores the unavoidable trade-offs of governance. He favors rent freezes that could restrict housing supply and make it harder for younger New Yorkers and new arrivals to afford housing. He wants the government to operate grocery stores, as if customer service and retail sales were strengths of the public sector. He minimizes the importance of policing.

At least one poll shows that a rent freeze is overwhelmingly popular (City and State, 4/15/25), and they’re far from unheard of: Rent freezes were a key policy victory under Mayor Bill de Blasio (City Limits, 6/28/16; Politico, 3/15/17; WNBC, 6/17/20), a mayor whose candidacy the board (9/5/17, 11/2/17) had enthusiastically supported.

The landlord class, which has organized against Mamdani’s campaign (Jacobin, 6/23/25), no doubt agrees with the Times‘ argument that if we don’t let rents go up, housing will be unaffordable—though 12 years of steady increases on regulated rentals under the tenure of Mayor Michael Bloomberg didn’t seem to make it easier to get an apartment here.

And is the grocery store pitch such a crazy idea? The rising cost of food, despite the Times’ framing, is a very real problem for New Yorkers (Daily News, 5/1/25). The city operates public housing, homeless shelters and  hospitals—and a public education system that delivers daily meals to more than 900,000 students.

The Times (12/12/24) positively explored the idea of city-owned stores in its news pages, citing how cities like Chicago and Atlanta were exploring similar missions. But when Mamdani proposes it, the editors present it as a sign of kookiness.

The New York Times (6/16/25) accused Mamdani of showing “little concern about the disorder of the past decade”—a time period when there were fewer killings in New York City than at any time since the 1950s (chart: Wikipedia).

The paper continued:

Most worrisome, he shows little concern about the disorder of the past decade, even though its costs have fallen hardest on the city’s working-class and poor residents. Mr. Mamdani, who has called Mr. de Blasio the best New York mayor of his lifetime, offers an agenda that remains alluring among elite progressives but has proved damaging to city life.

What disorder is the board talking about? We can guess they mean crime, but the homicide rate in New York City for the past ten years is the lowest it’s been since the 1950s. It’s true that Mamdani believes in police reform. The Times editorial board used to champion this cause (7/13/20, 9/13/20), even endorsing a reform-minded democratic socialist defense attorney for Queens district attorney five years ago (6/18/25).

Alex Vitale, professor of sociology at Brooklyn College and coordinator of the Policing and Social Justice Project, suggested that—”given that crime rates are at or near historic low”—the Times‘ “disorder” is likely “the presence of homeless mentally ill people on the subway and other public spaces.” But, he argues:

Ironically, Mamdani and to some extent [Comptroller Brad] Lander are the candidates who have actual plans to address the kind of disorder that pearl-clutching Times readers are worried about. They understand that the solution to this decades old problem is not endlessly using police to cycle people through jails and hospitals, but instead to develop actual supportive housing and other essential social services.

The Times has capitulated to neoliberal austerity, which accepts that cities have no choice but to cut services and turn the real estate market over to billionaires, and then use policing to manage the chaos that ensues.

As for the idea that Mamdani is somehow just a candidate for “elite progressives” but not the “working-class and poor,” the Times’ own interactive map shows a more nuanced story. While it’s true that Cuomo did well in, for example, the impoverished South Bronx, in Manhattan he won the monied districts like Tribeca and the Upper East and West Side, while Mamdani carried lower-income neighborhoods like Harlem, Washington Heights and the Lower East Side. Mamdani’s funding came mostly from small contributions—he had seven times as many donors as Cuomo (New York Times, 5/6/25)—whereas Cuomo was heavily funded by billionaires and the real-estate industry (City, 6/26/25).

The Atlantic‘s Michael Powell (6/18/25) said Mamdani’s campaign was “exuberantly disconnected from actual government budgets and organizational charts.”

The Atlantic published two anti-Mamdani articles, with two of them warning that Mamdani is too inexperienced to earn the people’s vote and that his ambitious proposals can’t be achieved. (A third went after his support for the phrase “globalize the intifada—6/24/25.) Former Times writer Michael Powell (6/18/25), like the Times editorial board, scoffed at the grocery store idea, saying, “How would he pay for his most ambitious plans? Tax the rich and major corporations.” His colleague Annie Lowery (6/12/25) joined in:

He is a leftist in the Bernie Sanders mold, with a raft of great-sounding policies. Free buses! Free childcare! Cheap groceries! Frozen rents! But a lot of these are impractical at best. Free buses would deprive the MTA of needed revenue. Free childcare would require a mammoth tax hike that Albany would need to approve, which it has shown no interest in doing.

Similarly, Powell pompously asserts that “Mamdani’s candidacy also has a quality of magic realism, a campaign exuberantly disconnected from actual government budgets and organizational charts.”

Progressives are often annoyed by the retort “how are you going to pay for it?” because this question only gets deployed against the expansion of healthcare, education and social services, and not jails, policing and subsidies for business. But it also exposes the superficialities of reporters’ knowledge of city affairs.

Many years ago, when I was a reporter at the Chief-Leader, a fellow reporter asked then-Mayor Michael Bloomberg why his budget proposal rested so much on the outcome of the city’s negotiations with its unions. His answer was simple: That’s what government is—it’s services for people, staffed by people. Any administration, in short, has to grapple with how to pay for its priorities, whether those priorities are left-wing or right-wing, and that often involves cutting bloat, consolidating functions and increasing revenue.

Mamdani’s spending plan offends the Atlantic, not because it costs money—the magazine (8/8/21, 3/8/23) has argued against efforts to cut police budgets—but because Atlantic writers and editors don’t like his budget priorities, which validate the New Deal concept of government services for the 99 Percent.

What Zohran Mamdani got right, according to the New Yorker (6/23/25), is understanding that “social media is where many voters decide if a politician…can be counted on.”

New Yorker coverage has been fairer to Mamdani than the Atlantic was, but Eric Lach’s interview (6/23/25) with the candidate honed in on a swipe favored by the assembly member’s critics, including the New York article FAIR already responded to: his youth. Lach said:

Mamdani has been stymied for several reasons that were apparent before primary day. For one thing, he is undeniably young, and he never found a way to reassure voters that he was truly up for the job of managing the city’s agencies, its $100 billion budget, and its 300,000-person workforce.

Democratic socialist upstarts have often been tagged as unruly whippersnappers who need to stop bothering party elders with competitive primaries. But in a moment where one of the biggest problems of the Democratic Party is its gerontocracy (Newsweek, 12/19/24; The Nation, 5/23/25; Atlantic, 6/19/25), perhaps Mamdani’s ineligibility for AARP membership is a strength.

Lach continued:

The new program of public spending he has proposed is predicated on increasing taxes on the wealthy and corporations, taxes that would have to be approved in Albany. If the big shots in Albany—never a good bet for anything, politically—refuse him, what would become of Mayor Mamdani? No one can say.

Warning that Mamdani’s agenda might cause friction with Albany suggests it might be Lach, not Mamdani, who is too new to the subject matter. The tension between state and city government is age-old, and consistent with every administration.

Once again, Mamdani gets extra scrutiny because of the substance of his agenda. Would Cuomo deal better with the state government he was forced to resign from, with a governor who is the deputy who replaced him? That’s a rhetorical question.

Marvel Comics‘ Daily Bugle used to run headlines like “Spider-Man: Threat or Menace?” The New York Post (6/23/25) is less ambivalent about Mamdani.

It is not surprising that Rupert Murdoch’s editorial boards savaged Mamdani. The New York Post (6/23/25) called him a  “cheap influencer” and “a babyfaced socialist antisemite who’s never accomplished anything except this so-buzzy campaign.” Likewise, Murdoch’s pro-business Wall Street Journal (6/22/25) claimed that “Manhattanites are warning that Mr. Mamdani’s ruinous utopianism could prompt a flight of talent and capital.”

But the onslaught from the more centrist outlets is telling: Like the business establishment, they fear progressive economic policies when it comes to housing, education, transit and public safety, despite all overtures to the contrary.

The good news is that this press assault failed. Perhaps that is because the political advice of the New York Times and Atlantic only still sways opinion in a few enclaves of the upper crust. The rage from the Post, Daily News and Journal probably only reached conservative audiences, who wouldn’t have ranked Mamdani anyway. And perhaps it also is testament to the degree that a grassroots messaging campaign can overcome an onslaught from the corporate media.

The bad news is that this was only the primary: incumbent Mayor Eric Adams will be running in the general election as an independent, and Andrew Cuomo has left that option open. Monied interests will likely double down, hoping to spread enough fear of a Mamdani-run New York City to help sink his meteoric rise—and elite media are rarely far behind them.

Janine Jackson interviewed the Joint Center’s LaToya Parker about the Trump budget’s racial impacts for the June 20, 2025, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

MarketWatch (3/7/25)

Janine Jackson: “Most Americans Can’t Afford Life Anymore” is the matter-of-fact headline over a story on Dow Jones MarketWatch. You might think that’s a “stop the presses” story, but apparently, for corporate news, it’s just one item among others these days.

The lived reality is, of course, not just a nightmare, but a crime, perpetrated by the most powerful and wealthy on the rest of us. As we marshal a response, it’s important to see the ways that we are not all suffering in the same ways, that anti-Black racism in this country’s decision-making is not a bug, but a feature, and not reducible to anything else. What’s more, efforts to reduce or dissolve racial inequities, to set them aside just for the moment, really just wind up erasing them.

So how do we shape a resistance to this massive transfer of wealth, while acknowledging that it takes intentionality for all of us to truly benefit?

LaToya Parker is a senior researcher at the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, and co-author, with Joint Center president Dedrick Asante-Muhammad, of the recent piece “This Federal Budget Will Be a Disaster for Black Workers.” She joins us now by phone from Virginia. Welcome to CounterSpin, LaToya Parker.

LaToya Parker: Thank you so much for having me.

JJ: I just heard Tavis Smiley, with the relevant reference to Martin Luther King, saying: “Budgets are moral documents.” Budgets can harm or heal materially, and they also send a message about priorities: what matters, who matters. When you and Dedrick Asante-Muhammad looked at the Trump budget bill that the House passed, you wrote that, “racially, the impact is stark”—for Black people and for Black workers in particular. I know that it’s more than one thing, but tell us what you are looking to lift up for people that they might not see.

OtherWords (5/28/25)

LP: Sure. Thank you so much for raising that. This bill is more than numbers. It’s a moral document, like you mentioned, that reveals our nation’s priorities. What stands out is a reverse wealth transfer. The ultra-wealthy get billions in tax breaks, while Black families lose the very programs that have historically provided pathways to the middle class.

JJ: You just said “historic pathways.” You can’t do economics without history. So wealth, home ownership—just static reporting doesn’t explain, really, that you can’t start people in a hole and then say, “Well, now the Earth is flat. So what’s wrong with you?” What are some of those programs that you’re talking about that would be impacted?

LP: For instance, nearly one-third of Black Americans rely on Medicaid. These cuts will limit access to vital care, including maternal health, elder care and mental health services.

Nearly 25% of Black households depend on SNAP, compared to under 8% of white households. SNAP cuts will hit Black families hardest, worsening food insecurities.

But in terms of federal workforce attacks, Black Americans are overrepresented in the public sector, 18.7% of the federal workforce, and over a third in the South. So massive agency cuts threaten thousands of stable, middle-class jobs, undermining one of the most successful civil rights victories in American history.

LaToya Parker: “The ultra-wealthy get billions in tax breaks, while Black families lose the very programs that have historically provided pathways to the middle class.”

So if I was to focus on the reverse wealth transfer, as we clearly lift up in the article, the House-passed reconciliation bill is a massive transfer of wealth from working families to the ultra-wealthy. It eliminates the estate tax, which currently only applies to estates worth more than $13.99 million per person, or nearly $28 million per couple. That’s just 1% of estates. So 99.9% of families, especially Black families, will never benefit from this.

Black families hold less than 5% of the US wealth, despite being over 13% of households. The median white household has 10 times the wealth of the median Black household. Repealing the estate tax subsidizes dynastic wealth for the majority white top 1%, and does nothing for the vast majority of Black families, who are far less likely to inherit significant wealth.

JJ: I feel like that wealth disconnection, and I’ve spoken with Dedrick Asante-Muhammad about this in the past, there’s a misunderstanding or just an erasure of history in the conversation about wealth, and Why don’t Black families have wealth? Why can’t they just give their kids enough money to go to school? And it sounds like it’s about Black families not valuing savings or something. But of course, we have a history of white-supremacist discrimination in lending and loaning and home ownership, and in all kinds of things that lead us to this situation that we’re in today. And you can’t move forward without recognizing that.

LP: Absolutely. Absolutely.

JJ: I remember reading a story years ago that said, “Here’s the best workplaces for women.” And it was kind of like, “Well, if you hate discrimination, these companies are good.” Reporting, I think, can make it seem as though folks are just sitting around thinking, “Well, what job should I get? Where should I get a job?” As though we were just equally situated economic actors.

But that doesn’t look anything like life. We are not consumers of employment. Media could do a different job of helping people understand the way things work.

LP: Absolutely. And I think that’s why it’s so important that you’re raising this issue. In fact, we bring it up in our article, in terms of cuts to the federal workforce and benefits. So, for instance, to pay for these tax breaks to the wealthy, the bill slashes benefits for federal employees, and it guts civil service protections, saving just $5 billion a year in the bill that costs trillions, right?

So just thinking about that, Black employees make up, like I said before, 18.7% of the federal workforce, thanks to decades of civil rights progress and anti-discrimination law. Federal jobs have long provided higher wages, stronger benefits and greater job security for Black workers than much of the private sector.

And the DMV alone, the DC/Maryland/Virginia region, more than 450,000 federal workers are employed, with Black workers making up over a quarter in DC/Maryland/Virginia. In the South, well over a third of the federal workers in states like Mississippi, Alabama, South Carolina and Louisiana are Black. In Georgia, it’s nearly 44%. So federal employment has been a cornerstone for Black middle-class advancement, helping families build generational wealth, send children to college and retire with dignity.

JJ: And so when we hear calls about, “Let’s thin out the federal government, because these are all bureaucrats who are making more money than they should,” it lands different when you understand that so many Black people found advancement, found opportunity through the federal government when they were being denied it at every other point. And it only came from explicit policies, anti-discriminatory policies, that opened up federal employment, that’s been so meaningful.

LP: Exactly. Exactly. Federal retirement benefits like the pensions and annuities are a rare source of guaranteed income. Nearly half of Black families have zero retirement savings, making these benefits critical to avoiding poverty in retirement. So these policies amount to a reverse wealth transfer, enriching wealthy heirs while undermining the public servants and systems that have historically offered a path forward for Black workers. Instead of gutting the benefits and eliminating the estate tax, we should invest in systems that have provided pathways to the middle class for Black workers, and expand these opportunities beyond government employment. Ultimately, this isn’t just about policy, it’s about what kind of nation we want to be, right? So that’s what it’s all about.

JJ: And I’ll just add to that with a final note. Of course, I’m a media critic, but I think lots of folks could understand why I reacted to this line from this MarketWatch piece that said, “Years of elevated prices have strained all but the wealthiest consumers, and low- and middle-income Americans say something needs to change.” Well, for me, I’m hearing that, and I’m like, “So it’s only low- and middle-income people, it’s only the people at the sharp end, who want anything to change.”

And, first of all, we’re supposed to see that as a fair fight, the vast majority of people against the wealthiest. But also, it makes it seem like such a zero-sum game, as though there isn’t any shared idea among a lot of people who want racial and economic equity in this country. It sells it to people as like, “Oh, well, we could make life livable for poor people or for Black people, but you, reader, are going to have to give something up.” It’s such a small, mean version of what I believe a lot of folks have in their hearts, in terms of a vision going forward in this country. And that’s just my gripe.

LP: I agree. These aren’t luxury programs. They’re lifelines across the board for all Americans. The working poor—if you like to call it that, some like to call it that—cutting them is just cruel, right? It’s economically destructive, it’s irresponsible. Fiscally, states would lose $1.1 trillion over 10 years, risking over a million jobs in healthcare and food industries alone. So I agree 100%.

JJ: All right, we’ll end on that note for now. We’ve been speaking with LaToya Parker, senior researcher at the Joint Center. They’re online at JointCenter.org, and you can find her piece, with Joint Center president Dedrick Asante-Muhammad, on the impact of the federal budget on Black workers at OtherWords.org. Thank you so much, LaToya Parker, for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

LP: Thank you again for having me.

Column (6/22/25)

This week on CounterSpin: Prosecutors at the 1946 International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg declared:

War is essentially an evil thing. Its consequences are not confined to the belligerent states alone, but affect the whole world. To initiate a war of aggression, therefore, is not only an international crime; it is the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.

After the Trump administration dropped bombs on Iran last weekend, without congressional approval, the media debate wasn’t about legality, much less humanity. The Wall Street Journal offered a video series on The Massive Ordnance Penetrator, “The 30,000-Pound US Bomb That Could Destroy Iran’s Nuclear Bunkers.” But it’s not just boys excited by toys; the very important Wall Street Journal is “examining military innovation and tactics emerging around the world, breaking down the tech behind the weaponry and its potential impact.”

Most big media are consumed right now with whether those bunker busters did their bunker busting or maybe the US needs to buy bigger, better bombs to…do what, exactly? Well, now you’re asking too many questions.

Things you should not question? Statements like that of Sen. John Fetterman that Iran is the world’s No. 1 state sponsor of terror.

US corporate media in war mode are a force to reckon with. We do some reckoning with media analyst Adam Johnson, co-host of the podcast Citations Needed, Substack author at the Column, and co-author, with In These Times contributing editor Sarah Lazare, of some relevant pieces at InTheseTimes.com.

Janine Jackson interviewed CEPR’s Michael Galant about sanctions and immigration for the June 20, 2025, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

CBS (6/7/25)

Janine Jackson: Federal agents are abducting people off the streets, rolling up on workplaces and playgrounds to tear men, women and children away from their families. Driving off in vans, telling no one where they’re going. They’re interrupting scheduled immigration status appointments to say, We’ve changed the rules, and now you’re out of status and a criminal. Into the van. Raising a question, observing—well, that counts as interference, also now a crime. Sometimes they’re saying that the abduction was an administrative error, after someone has been left in a basement without food or water for a while.

There is much to acknowledge and understand in the current nightmare, but if one question is, “Given it all, why would anyone think it makes sense to try to come to the US to live?” then you’ll need to expand your vision to the global stage, and see the role that US actions have in determining conditions in the countries immigrants are coming from. And why “If you don’t like it here, go back where you came from,” lands different when circumstances in the place they come from will still be determined by US policy.

Michael Galant is senior research and outreach associate at the Center for Economic and Policy Research. He joins us now by phone from here in town. Welcome to CounterSpin, Michael Galant.

Michael Galant: Thanks so much for having me.

JJ: I will say the issue isn’t only with MAGA replacement theory zealots who think that the immigrants are dragging us into criminal chaos. I suspect a lot of “liberals” think that while it’s mean to call immigrants “invaders”—because, after all, “they” do a lot for “us”—still, they’re coming here to take advantage of our superior quality of life, and maybe we just can’t afford that anymore. The “us and them” line is still operative in many people’s understanding of immigration, and that confuses and obscures something, doesn’t it?

MG: Yeah, and I think you’re absolutely right that there is this sort of bipartisan consensus that, whatever we might disagree on what the appropriate level of migration is, or with what humanity we should be treating migrants, but they’re still operating on the same terrain, right, the same sort of frame of understanding, of the question of migration. And I think that question itself really needs to be addressed, as you mentioned in the intro, it is often US policies that are themselves determining the conditions that caused migrants to leave in the first place. And it’s oddly rarely questioned in Congress. It’s rarely discussed, why are people leaving in the first place, and, perhaps, why is the US enacting policies that are contributing to those conditions?

CEPR (3/3/25)

JJ: The US interferes in other countries in multiple ways, but you wrote recently about one that goes under the radar—under under the radar, in this context. So talk to us about this piece that you wrote with Alex Main about economic sanctions. And I want to say, you make clear it’s not about a feeling, it’s not about an anecdotal sense about the reasons people have for moving. It’s research, it’s data.

MG: Yeah, that’s exactly right. And I want to make clear from the start: Migrants should be welcomed into our communities. They should not be scapegoated, they should not be repressed. And, at the same time, we should not be creating the conditions that force them to leave their homes.

I mean, most migrants are not choosing to leave their community, to leave the only place they’ve ever known, often leave their families, to come to a new country where they risk discrimination, on a whim, right? They’re coming for good reason, and that is typically they’ve seen either violence and insecurity in their homes, or they are facing poverty and lack of economic opportunity.

That should not be a shocking thing. I think if you talk to anybody on the street, they will tell you that migrants are more likely to be coming from poorer countries to wealthier countries. And there’s US involvement in that, and the whole range of potential issues, of which economic sanctions is only one. But I can go into that, as that was the subject of our piece and of our research.

JJ: Please.

CEPR (9/25/23)

MG: So, effectively, the argument here is pretty simple. There are mounds of evidence that economic sanctions harm people. Sanctions come in many forms, but in their broadest forms, broad economic sanctions, which is those imposed on Cuba and Venezuela, the goal, the intent, is to harm the macroeconomy of these countries, which in turn, of course, affects civilians. It affects their lives, it affects whether they can feed their children. So because there are mountains of evidence that sanctions are harming individuals, there are also mountains of evidence that people migrate due to economic need. One plus one equals two. It is clear that when we impose sanctions on countries and hurt their people, the effect of that is going to be that people migrate to the United States.

But there is also recent research to that effect. So in October of last year, the Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization published what I think is the first and only systematic cross-national analysis of how sanctions impact international migration. And using data flows from 157 countries, I believe, the authors find that Western multilateral sanctions have increased, on average, immigration from targeted countries by 22 to 24%. So that’s a massive increase as a result of sanctions. And the authors also find that when sanctions are lifted, migration decreases again. So there’s a clear empirical analysis there that one plus one equals two, sanctions harm people, harmed people migrate, sanctions cause migration.

JJ: I think that there is such a miscommunication about economic sanctions in the news media that obscures that very kind of information. They’re often presented as “making Castro squirm,” they’re presented as targeted, and they’re really only going to target leadership in countries. Now there’s a problem with that already, but what you’re saying is, no, there’s no way to simply surgically target an economic sector of a country without having that impact folks, and usually the most vulnerable first.

Michael Galant: “Sanctions are presented as this peaceful alternative to warfare, but often for civilians on the ground, the effects are very similar to war.”

MG: That’s exactly right. Sanctions are presented as this peaceful alternative to warfare, but often for civilians on the ground, the effects are very similar to war.

And “sanction” is a broad term. This does include imposing visa restrictions on individual foreign leaders. Of course, that’s not going to have the same effect as, say, the entire embargo of Cuba. But many of our sanctions regimes are broad, and intentionally so. The implicit logic of them is we hurt this country’s economy, that causes distress among the civilian population, and eventually the civilian population will rise up and overthrow their government.

And so in Cuba, when the embargo was imposed, there was a State Department memo from the time that has since been declassified, where it makes those intentions very plain. It says the goal is to cause hunger in order to overthrow the regime.

These days, government officials, advocates of sanctions, are often much more careful in their word choices. But the implicit logic of sanctions involves the intentional targeting of civilians.

JJ: I think it’s important to interrogate that logic. Some would say it’s hypocritical or cross-purposed to say, “Well, we’re going to sanction their country into hardship…but they can’t come here!” It’s complicated, and yet it makes sense if you’re of a certain frame of mind, I guess.

MG: That’s exactly right. To take one example, and I can also talk through Venezuela, but to take Cuba as an example, because it is one of our oldest, most comprehensive sanctions regimes, sanctions have been in place over six decades now, with the embargo. And there has been some tightening and loosening of sanctions over the years, particularly under the Obama administration. There was a light thawing of relations and the easing of sanctions, and we saw their economy really improved during that time, as hopes improved and the like.

New York Times (6/16/17)

But then when Trump came in the first time, he reversed all the Obama measures, and then tightened sanctions even further. Biden, unfortunately, basically maintained the Trump measures. He made only very small tweaks at the margin. And as a result of that, we’ve seen, from 2020 to 2024, 13% of Cuba’s population emigrated in those four years, 13%. It’s really shocking to imagine, if any of your listeners—many are probably based in the US, some are probably based abroad—imagine 13% of your country’s population immigrating over four years, and a good deal of that immigration is a result of the US sanction that has ended in an economic crisis, and made it much harder for ordinary people to live their lives.

JJ: Media tend to personalize, just to pull us back to media. Here’s a woman who crossed the border, holding her son close, or whatever, and it can be moving and poignant, but I feel that one effect of that is to kind of get people thinking on an individual level: “Well, I would never do that. I wouldn’t make that choice in those circumstances.” In terms of media, the story of migration is of course about people, but if we don’t integrate an understanding of policy and practices, we’re not going to get that story right.

MG: Absolutely. I think we need both. I understand that my organization has a lot of economists, and we’ll talk in terms of numbers, and sometimes that won’t really pull at people’s heartstrings in the way that they need to. And at the same time, on the other hand, you have the case where you talk only in terms of individuals, and don’t understand the broader structural causes, and how US policy contributes to these conditions. So we need both of them. Absolutely. But, yeah, we should not ignore, we should not remove ourselves from the structural causes, because, ultimately, when you look at the world—no one would disagree with you that migration tends to flow from poorer countries to wealthier countries.

And so the “solution” to migration—not that migration is itself a problem—but the “solution” is very clear. It is development of the Global South, allowing the Global South to develop, addressing the many ways in which US and other policies of wealthy countries inhibit the stability, economic and otherwise, of the Global South, and to allow greater shared global peace and stability and prosperity.

JJ: Well, and finally and briefly, that vision is shared. You note in the piece that, while the Biden administration claimed to address root causes, they had an inadequate understanding or representation of those causes, if you will. But there are, finally, other visions out there that acknowledge this.

MG: That’s right. And we’re seeing, of course, there have always been more grassroots people’s movements that have mobilized in solidarity with the Global South in pursuit of a more equitable world order. But now we’re also seeing in Congress, there was a group of progressives led by Rep. Greg Casar of Texas, and also representatives Ramirez and Kamlager-Dove, who created a new caucus, but it’s specifically about reframing how we understand migration.

And Representative Casar introduced a migration stability resolution, which is all about the actions that would be needed to address how the US contributes to migration. And it includes, just to name a few, how US weapons trafficking feeds cartel violence in Mexico; fixing trade agreements that are designed to work for multinational corporations based in the US, instead of working-class people here and abroad; fixing the inequities in the global financial architecture that result in debt crises in developing countries; addressing the climate crisis; stopping destabilizing US interventions, from coups to military interventions.

This whole gamut of actions is to truly address migration at its root, if we’re not just listening to those who are trying to scapegoat migrants. To truly address migration at its core requires an entire reorientation of how the US relates to the Global South, and Latin America in particular.

JJ: We’ve been speaking with Michael Galant, from the Center for Economic and Policy Research. His piece, with Alex Main, “Economic Sanctions: A Root Cause of Migration,” can be found on their website at CEPR.net. Thank you so much, Michael Galant, for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

MG: Thank you.

Janine Jackson interviewed Defending Rights and Dissent’s Chip Gibbons about freeing Mahmoud Khalil for the June 12, 2025, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

Zeteo (6/12/25)

Janine Jackson: As we record on June 12, the official death toll in Gaza is…something that need not be of specific concern, given ample evidence that no number would, in itself, magically change the indifference of powerful bodies to the ongoing crime of murder, starvation, displacement and erasure of Palestinians by Israel, with critical US material and political support. UN humanitarian chief Tom Fletcher said recently, without trying to compare his experience to that of Gazans, that he has started therapy to deal with his experience, just witnessing trauma on this scale.

But when people speak up about something that bipartisan US politicians and US corporate media support, that criticism becomes suspect, by which is increasingly meant criminal. So here we are with Columbia University graduate—or what Fox News calls “anti-Israel ringleader”—Mahmoud Khalil, charged with no crime, but detained since March.

Chip Gibbons is policy director at Defending Rights & Dissent, and journalist and researcher working on a new history of FBI national security surveillance. Welcome back to CounterSpin, Chip Gibbons.

Chip Gibbons: It’s always a pleasure to be back on CounterSpin.

JJ: There’s always a lot I could talk with you about, but, for today, I know that listeners with horrible news coming at them from all sides may have lost the thread on Mahmoud Khalil. What is the latest on his case, and how good is that latest news? What should we think about it?

CG: As of June 12, when we’re recording this, Mahmoud Khalil is still detained at the LaSalle Immigration Detention Center in Jena, Louisiana. It is a private immigration prison. If you go on their website, they talk about their commitment to family values, but the conditions there—you’ll be shocked to learn this—are not very good. I’m not sure what type of family values they’re talking about.

CBS (6/13/25)

Recently, a judge has ruled on a preliminary injunction that Mahmoud Khalil brought, asking that the immigration provision that [Secretary of State Marco] Rubio relies on, that gives the secretary of state the power to expel someone from the country if they pose a threat to US foreign policy, is unconstitutional as applied to [Khalil], enjoined Rubio from enforcing it against him, voiding the determination that Rubio made, as well as enjoining the Trump administration from enforcing what Khalil’s lawyers alleged, and what I think is not really just an allegation at this point, is a policy of arresting and detaining noncitizens who criticize Israel or support Palestinian rights. The judge has given the Trump administration until Friday to appeal, and has stayed his own order.

Of all the other similarly situated individuals in immigration proceedings over their pro-Palestine speech, the judges have granted them bail pending a final motion. Khalil submitted a motion for bail. It’s never been ruled on, and now the judge has issued this injunction that could potentially set him free, but has given the government until Friday to file an appeal, and it’s unclear, if the government files the appeal, if that will further stay his time in detention.

And Khalil is a father. His child was born while he was detained. He was not able to attend the birth of his child, and for an extended period he was denied a contact visit with the newborn child until a judge intervened.

And the thing we have to remember here, this is very difficult to keep track of, is that Khalil is really in two separate legal proceedings right now. He’s in an immigration removal proceeding, which takes place in immigration court, and immigration court is not part of the “Article Three”—that’s Article Three of the US Constitution—judiciary.

It is part of the Department of Justice. Immigration Judges work for Pam Bondi, the attorney general. You can appeal an immigration judge’s decision to the Board of Immigration Appeals, which is appointed by Pam Bondi, the attorney general, and the attorney general can reverse or modify any decision of the Board of Immigration Appeals. So immigration court is basically a kangaroo court.

At the same time, he’s challenging the constitutionality of this detention, not the removal itself, but the detention as unconstitutional in federal court, with what’s called a federal habeas petition. And the habeas corpus, of course, goes back to before the Magna Carta, but it was enshrined as a basic human right in the Magna Carta, and he’s arguing his detention is unconstitutional.

And the reason for these two proceedings is that immigration courts are very limited in what they can do, beyond the sort of kangaroo court nature that I just described, where the attorney general is usually the party seeking the deportation, and the person making the decision works for the attorney general, and if the attorney general doesn’t like their decision, they can modify it. The Board of Immigration Appeals ruled during the Clinton years that once the secretary of state makes a determination that someone’s presence in the US has adverse foreign policy consequences, they can be removed from the country. There’s essentially no defense, and immigration judges cannot hear constitutional challenges or issues.

On the flip side, federal courts are barred from hearing challenges to the attorney general’s enforcement or commencement of immigration proceedings, but they are allowed to weigh challenges to detention. So Khalil and other similarly situated defendants are using the habeas remedy to challenge the constitutionality of the detention.

Guardian (3/13/25)

In Khalil’s case, it gets very complicated even further, because the government has brought two “immigration charges” against him. One is the claim that his presence poses a threat to our foreign policy. The other is that he misled immigration officials on his application by not mentioning he was part of a student group, which it’s unclear why that would affect his Green Card.

And there’s also allegations about when he did or didn’t work for the British government. He worked at the British Embassy, I think, in Lebanon, and the Trump administration is bringing that up, which I believe was disclosed on his application. And his lawyers have offered information refuting this charge, but the immigration judge has refused to hear it.

The immigration judge, by the way, not only works for the Department of Justice, she’s a former ICE employee. She’s refused to hear it on the grounds that she doesn’t need to make a decision on this, because she has the Rubio determination. And the preliminary injunction only applies, we think, to the Rubio determination, because the judge ruled in the previous ruling he was unlikely to prevail on a constitutional challenge to the misleading application charge.

So that’s sort of the convoluted legal situation we’re in. Khalil is in a removal proceeding in immigration court. He’s in a federal challenge to detention in federal court, and a federal judge has issued an injunction to enforcing the Rubio determination against him, but not the second charge, which an immigration judge has refused to rule on. Rubio’s saying it’s a sole removal basis. And that judge has also issued a stay giving the government time to appeal. So he remains detained even though his detention is likely unconstitutional, and a judge has found that he suffers irreparable harm by this detention.

JJ: I want to lift up a piece that you mentioned that we’re seeing, is that criminality, or the ability to be detained, has to do with something you do having “adverse foreign policy consequences.” I know that folks hear that and are like, “What? What do you mean? If the current administration has certain foreign policy objectives, and I disagree with them, that means if I speak out in opposition, I’m committing a crime?”

CG: So I think we have to remember, and this gets sort of pedantic, but Khalil is not charged with a crime, and the provision is not a criminal provision. It is a provision about whether or not you can be admitted into the US or removed from the US. So Khalil has not been charged with any criminal offense. They’re invoking a provision that says if your presence has adverse foreign policy consequences for the United States…

JJ: Your presence, OK.

Al Jazeera (3/23/25)

CG: …signs a piece of paper saying this is true, or it makes determination of it, you can be deported from the US. So this is not a criminal matter.

What does this provision even cover or does not cover is a really fascinating question. And the judge in the Khalil habeas case has stated that it’s unconstitutional as applied to Khalil, because no reasonable person would have notice that this provision could apply to domestic political speech or domestic speech.

He noted a number of instances when it was used in the ’90s by the Clinton administration, but they were all against people who were accused of criminal conduct in foreign countries. So you had a Saudi national who was accused of terrorism in Jordan; you had an alleged paramilitary leader from Haiti. You had a Mexican official who was accused of a number of crimes; but it was not someone who was in this country and engaged in political speech about a foreign government’s genocide, and therefore no reasonable person would have any notice that this statute could apply to their domestic speech.

JJ: I’m going to keep us short for today, although there are much, much and myriad things we could talk about, but you and I both know that once politicians take up an individual case—Julian Assange, Michael Brown, Mahmoud Khalil—we know that then news media bring out the microscopes. Is this really a good guy? How did he treat his mother? I’m seeing some parking tickets here. There might be some particulars to investigate.

There’s almost a vocational effort to make there be something specific about this person that makes it make sense that they are being targeted. And then the effect of that is to tell everyone listening, As long as you don’t do what this guy did, you’re going to be safe. Why is the Mahmoud Khalil case so important to folks who don’t even know who Mahmoud Khalil is, and don’t understand why it matters?

Chip Gibbons: “This is a case about whether or not we have a First Amendment right to criticize Israel for engaging in a genocide in Gaza, or support the human rights of the Palestinian people.”

CG: This is a case about whether or not we have a First Amendment right to criticize Israel for engaging in a genocide in Gaza, or support the human rights of the Palestinian people. The case is currently about an obscure Cold War immigration provision, and whether or not it can be used to deport a lawful, permanent resident, all of which has profound legal questions for individuals in this country who are immigrants or noncitizens. But at the end of the day, we should not believe this will remain only in the noncitizen realm.

The Heritage Foundation, who laid out a lot of the playbook about using deportations to target student activists, has made it clear their final goal is to equate all protests for Palestine with material support for terrorism. In the past, when we’ve seen immigration enforcement abuse for political policing, J. Edgar Hoover during the Palmer raids; the Los Angeles Eight, who were supporters of Palestinian rights who the Reagan, Bush I, Clinton and Bush II administrations sought to deport, both of those cases preconfigure or forbode larger attacks of civil liberties that eventually affect everyone.

Which is not to say that we shouldn’t care about the rights of noncitizens; we should care about everyone’s free-speech rights.

But if you believe this is going to stay with Green Card holders or student visa holders, the goal is to take away your right to criticize a foreign apartheid state’s genocide, with the eventual goal of taking away your right to criticize US foreign policy. And this is the vehicle for doing it. It starts today, with the visa holders and the Green Card holders, but they will come for the natural-born citizens eventually, too, if they get away with this.

JJ: We’ve been speaking with Chip Gibbons of Defending Rights & Dissent. They’re online at RightsAndDissent.org. Chip Gibbons, thank you so much for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

CG: Thank you for having me back.

After years of dealing with a corruption-ridden Mayor Eric Adams, beleaguered New Yorkers on June 24 selected a mayoral candidate in the Democratic primary—often the city’s de facto general election. While the city’s ranked-choice voting system meant that the official winner won’t be known until July 1, the presumed victor is the top vote-getter in the first round: state assembly member Zorhan Mamdani.

But for much of this election cycle, it has been easy for a casual consumer of news to believe that only one person was in the running to replace Adams: disgraced former New York State Gov. Andrew Cuomo.

A FAIR analysis of media coverage of the top six Democratic candidates (based on polling through the end of May) found that Cuomo’s name appeared in headlines seven times more often than Zohran Mamdani, who for months had been in second place in opinion polls, and nine times more often than Brad Lander, who typically came in No. 3 in the polls (as he did in first-round voting). The omissions were sometimes egregious; for example, one May 2025 New York Times article (5/17/25) was headlined “Can Cool Kids Get This Mayoral Candidate Elected?” Mamdani was the candidate in question, but his name was relegated to the subhead.

FAIR searched the Nexis Uni news database for US news stories that included each  candidate’s name and the words “mayor” and “election.” (We looked on May 28, 2025, going from September 1, 2024, until the date of search.) We then manually filtered out duplicates and false positives. Cuomo received by far the most references, with 411. Lander had the second-most, with 266; Mamdani had only 203.

Cuomo’s mentions increased markedly after he announced his candidacy on March 1, but rumors of his candidacy made him the most-mentioned candidate in most of the preceding months.

FAIR searched Media Cloud‘s New York state and local news database as well, with similar results: Cuomo became the clear leader in mentions in February, with far greater coverage than his competitors in the three months before the election. Cuomo had 141 mentions in New York media in the month of May, versus 84 for Mamdani and 78 for Lander.

Media Cloud analysis of New York Democratic mayoral primary coverage.

Maisie Williams as Arya Stark from Game of Thrones.

To understand why this matters, consider a different name—Arya.

The first time the name Arya appears on the Social Security Administration’s list of most popular baby names is in 2010, where it crawled onto the list as the 942nd-most popular name for girls. That’s the same year that Game of Thrones debuted with a bang, introducing the country to Arya Stark—a main character and a fan favorite.  By 2019, when the show fizzled its way off the air, the name Arya had become the 92nd-most popular baby name for girls in the country.

Despite the truism that familiarity breeds contempt, familiarity can in fact create affinity, according to Kentaro Fukumoto, a professor of political science at the University of Tokyo.

“In psychology, there’s a theory called the mere exposure effect,” Fukumoto told FAIR. “The theory argues that when you’re exposed to something [enough] you start to like it.”

Mere exposure effect is how one goes from not even knowing the name Arya to deciding to name your child Arya. It’s also how we sometimes go from hating a song on the radio to loving it. And it’s why companies—and politicians—run ads. The hope is that if we hear a name often enough, it will unconsciously motivate us to buy the product or vote for the candidate. And there’s some evidence, at least when it comes to politicians, that they’re right.

In 2018, Fukumoto published a study that looked at what happened in Japanese elections when a Japanese national candidate shared a last name with a candidate in a down-ballot race—and thus voters were exposed to that name a lot.  Fukumoto found that in districts where candidates shared a name, the national candidate received a 69% boost, compared to how they performed in districts where they didn’t share a name.  So, for example, if a national candidate had 10% of the vote share, in districts where they shared a name with a down-ballot candidate, their vote share would become 17% —a sizable jump.

Campaigns use lawn signs in part to increase the familiarity of their candidates’ names (Creative Commons photo: Eric Behrens).

Fukumoto cautions that for major candidates, the effect is likely not as large, but the effect is very important for minor candidates—say, a lesser-known candidate challenging an incumbent. In the New York City mayoral race, Mamdani and the other less-covered candidates certainly were much less well-known than Cuomo, who not only served as governor, but whose father also served as governor from 1983–94.

A 2013 study by researchers at Vanderbilt University also found that name recognition can give candidates a boost. That study took advantage of the fact that a local school had strict routes for parents to drive down, to avoid creating the dreaded overburdened school pick-up line. The researchers placed four lawn signs for a local election with a fictional candidate—Ben Griffin—along one of the routes, and then surveyed all of the parents afterwards. They found that parents who drove along the route with the sign were 10 percentage points more likely than those who didn’t drive along the route to say that they would put Griffin—who, remember, did not exist—in their top three choices for a council seat.  And that’s a handful of lawn signs placed along one road.

In aggregate, news outlets prioritizing one candidate over others could shift the outcome of the election. When one considers that the 2021 mayoral primary election was decided by just 7,000 votes, it matters that Lander received roughly 35% less attention, Mamdani 50% less attention, and Adrienne Adams, the speaker of the New York City Council (and no relationship to Eric Adams), received 62% less coverage than Cuomo.

Some of Cuomo’s coverage may have related to his history of scandals (New Republic, 1/26/24)—but a FAIR analysis (4/9/25) found media downplayed that record.

Some of Cuomo’s mentions were likely tied to the continued fallout of his governorship, including his concealment of nursing home deaths during the Covid-19 pandemic, and lawsuits tied to the New York attorney general’s report on complaints that he had sexually harassed employees. That report affirmed that Cuomo had sexually harassed members of his own staff as well as other state employees, creating a culture “filled with fear and intimidation.”

But at the same time, many of the candidates in the race were current government officials, who might be expected to generate news coverage in the course of their work. Adrienne Adams has been the speaker of the New York City Council since 2022. Lander is the city’s current comptroller, widely considered the second most powerful citywide office, serving as the chief financial officer and auditor of the city agencies. Mamdani is a New York State Assembly member, and Zellnor Myrie is a New York State senator.

And negative news coverage doesn’t mean negative election impact for candidates receiving outsize media attention—Donald Trump famously received billions of dollars worth of free media in his 2016 campaign, much of it negative.

The Atlantic‘s Annie Lowrey (6/12/25) noted that “the political scion with a multimillion-dollar war chest and blanket name recognition could lose to the young Millennial whom few New Yorkers had heard of as of last year”—before going on to argue that “if this is democracy, it’s a funny form of it.”

Further, while the analysis focused on the frequency of occurrences, not the tone, in recent weeks some news outlets have made their support for Cuomo more explicit. The New York Times editorial board said in 2024 that it would no longer endorse candidates for local races, but still this week published a confusingly written piece (6/16/25) that amounted to an endorsement for the former governor. (In April, a FAIR analysis—4/9/25—found the Times’ coverage of the former governor’s record notably forgiving.)

Similarly, Annie Lowrey in the Atlantic  (6/12/25) wrote a piece, rife with inaccuracies about voting methods, criticizing the city’s system for primaries as anti-democratic. New York City uses a ranked-choice system, which allows voters to rank mayoral candidates in their order of preference. While mathematicians don’t all agree on which voting systems are the best at accurately capturing voter preferences, there is broad consensus that plurality voting—where the candidate who gets the most votes in a single round wins—is the worst. Like the New York Times editorial, Lowrey’s article ends up as a de facto endorsement for the former governor, but by criticizing the system, it also acts to undermine the election itself. In other words, if Cuomo loses under this system—according to Lowrey—no he didn’t.

It’s unsettling that news outlets that proclaim to be for democracy are putting their thumbs on the scale, providing Cuomo with extensive coverage even as he mostly avoided actually meeting the people he has said he wants to govern.

However, while name recognition is important, news coverage is not the only way to get it. In 2018, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez unseated Joe Crowley, a Democrat who had served as the US representative for New York’s 14th District for almost two decades, and received almost no media attention before she did so. She did it, in part, by knocking on doors.

Mamdani, who entered the race in the low single digits as a relatively unknown assemblymember, and headed into Primary Day neck and neck with Cuomo in polling, pledged to knock on at least 1 million doors before NYC’s June 24 Democratic primary. Two weeks ago, on TikTok, Mamdani said they were on track to reach that goal 10 days early.