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In recent years, transgender Americans have seen an exponentially growing assault on their rights.

In the first half of 2025 alone, 942 anti-trans bills have been introduced throughout the country—more than were introduced in all of 2024—and since taking office, President Donald Trump has signed no fewer than 12 anti-trans executive orders.

It’s an attack that the New York Times editorial board called “Trump’s Shameful Campaign Against Transgender Americans” (2/9/25). The editorial explained that the attacks seek

to exclude transgender people from nearly every aspect of American public life: denying them accurate identification documents such as passports, imposing a nationwide restriction on gender-affirming medical care for transgender youths, investigating schools with gender-neutral bathrooms, criminalizing teacher support for transgender students and commanding the Federal Bureau of Prisons to force the estimated 1,500 transgender women in custody to be housed with men.

But the irony of the Times‘ condemnation of transphobia was not lost on those familiar with the paper’s history of biased, sensationalistic coverage of trans issues. As transgender journalist and media critic Erin Reed (Erin in the Morning, 2/9/25) put it, “The New York Times does not get to erase its role in how we got here.”

Follow-up study

For years, media journalists and critics, including here at FAIR, have called out the Times’ pattern of platforming transphobes before trans people, spreading dangerous misinformation and framing trans rights as up for debate (FAIR.org, 5/19/23, 8/30/23, 5/28/24).

A 2023 FAIR study (5/11/23) found that in a year of front-page coverage of trans issues, rather than centering the growing assault on the trans community and its impact on that community, the Times largely focused on whether “trans people are receiving too many rights, and accessing too much medical care, too quickly.”

FAIR conducted a follow-up study looking at the Times’ front-page stories between February 2024 and January 2025. This time we found slightly more coverage, but even fewer trans voices. Even while feigning concern, the paper of record remains largely uninterested in centering trans people and perspectives in coverage of trans issues, while failing to challenge misleading and transphobic right-wing narratives.

Growing frequency, changing subject matter

FAIR found that the New York Times‘ front page featured stories about trans issues 13 times, with an additional 49 pieces that mentioned the word “transgender.” It’s a small increase from the 2023 study, which found nine trans-centered stories and 30 pieces that mentioned but did not center trans issues.

It’s still far less coverage than the paper’s national competitor, the Washington Post, gave trans issues in the 2023 study: 22 front-page stories and 54 front-page story mentions.

FAIR also found a sharp drop in the Times’ use of trans sources, from 19% in the previous period to 11% (14 sources). Where in the last study, each of the nine front-page articles quoted at least one trans source, our new study found three of the Times‘ 13 pieces, or 23%, lacking any trans or nonbinary person’s perspective.

Once again, most of the Times‘ front-page stories about trans issues were not centered on trans people and the issues they face, but on trans people as a problem for cisgender people—whether athletes (“Volleyball Team in Grip of Fierce Debate on Transgender Rights”—11/29/24) or politicians (“Debating Role of Trans Rights in Harris’s Loss”— 11/21/24).

In the last study, six of the nine front-page articles questioned gender-affirming care or pitted trans rights against the rights of others (such as parents or cis women).  A year later, those themes are still prominent (four articles), while the paper’s attention to trans issues in the political arena increased, from one article to eight. Yet despite the increased attention—which followed the escalating right-wing anti-trans campaign that took trans rights to the Supreme Court and the center of the 2024 presidential campaign—the paper’s framing still repeatedly adopts or fails to challenge right-wing narratives.

This year, FAIR counted sources that advanced misinformation about trans issues that went unchallenged in the story, such as those that claimed that gender-affirming care is ineffective, experimental or risky, or that used anti-trans talking points that the Times failed to present without critical context. Such sources generalized gender-affirming care as irreversible, exaggerated detransition rates, or claimed that trans women hold a wholesale advantage in women’s sports. Fourteen sources (11%) were in this category—equal to the number of trans people who appeared as sources.

FAIR also found that nine sources (7%) had undisclosed anti-trans backgrounds—lending credence to these sources’ authority on trans issues by concealing their prior anti-trans advocacy or rhetoric. Of these sources, two were allowed to spread misinformation without challenge.

The front-page articles all fell into one of three broad themes: gender-affirming medical care and related court battles (five articles), non-court politics (five articles) and sports and culture (three articles).

Questioning ‘gender drugs’

The New York Times put five pieces covering gender-affirming care for minors on its front page: three covering related court battles in the US and two questioning its efficacy. These five pieces accounted for more than half of the cases of unchallenged misinformation (9)—painting gender-affirming care as risky, experimental and ineffective—and of obscured anti-trans backgrounds (5). Combined, these five pieces had only four trans sources.

The three pieces covering court battles focused largely on the legal technicalities of whether bans on care constitute sex discrimination, rather than how these bans would impact trans minors, adults and their families. They overwhelmingly quoted judges and lawyers, marginalizing the voices of trans people and their families, and leaving unchallenged the premises that care is “experimental” (12/4/24, 12/5/24) and poses “significant risks with unproven benefits” (12/4/24).

Two of the court-related articles followed the Supreme Court’s decision to uphold a ban on care for minors in Tennessee (12/4/24, 12/5/24); both quoted Chase B. Strangio, the trans ACLU lawyer representing the families in the case, in his oral arguments, but quoted no other trans people or advocates speaking to how these bans could impact trans people and their families. (The first also quoted a line from the families’ legal argument about parental rights.)

We counted more pieces of misinformation in this New York Times story (4/10/24) than in any other piece in our study.

Both of the pieces questioning care for minors were written by Azeen Ghorayshi, a Times science reporter who has previously been criticized for misreporting the experiences of trans minors and their families, misrepresenting study findings, and promoting unsubstantiated claims that contributed in part to the closure of a St. Louis youth gender clinic. Ghorayshi’s two front-page pieces reveal continued misrepresentation and lack of trans perspectives.

The first was “Britain Limits Gender Drugs for Children” (4/10/24), which recapped the NHS-commissioned Cass Review, while also promoting misinformation pertaining to the safety and efficacy of gender-affirming care. (This article contained four pieces of unchallenged misinformation, the most of any in our study period, and only included one trans source.)

The article eagerly accepted the authority of “independent pediatrician” Dr. Hilary Cass in her finding that “for most young people, a medical pathway will not be the best way to manage their gender-related distress.” Not only did the piece fail to mention that this claim is disputed by the leading world health authorities and every major medical association in the US, it also omitted that Cass had no prior experience or expertise in working with trans patients, nor did most of her named contributors.

The only challenge Ghorayshi presented to the review, which is littered with serious methodological flaws, was unrelated to the quality of Cass’s research or her lack of credentials. Instead, she mentioned that transgender advocacy groups in Europe have condemned legislative changes informed by Cass’s findings, before quickly describing these changes as “notably different from the outright bans for adolescents passed in 22 US states.” (Ghorayshi didn’t note that Cass contributed to a similarly politically motivated report in Florida, which was used to justify the state’s ban on care.)

‘Unpublished because of politics’

Since Joanna Olson-Kennedy’s study does not have a control group, she was concerned that her data would be misused to suggest that puberty blockers are ineffective—which is exactly what this New York Times article (10/23/24) does.

The second piece, “Doctor, Fearing Outrage, Slows a Gender Study” (10/24/24), and its web version, “US Study on Puberty Blockers Goes Unpublished Because of Politics, Doctor Says” (10/23/24), insinuate that researcher Dr. Johanna Olson-Kennedy might have withheld study data because it undermined her pro-gender-affirming care agenda.

Though the print version reached nearly 1500 words, it only quoted three sources, none of which are trans: Olson-Kennedy, who has specialized in the treatment of trans children and adolescents for close to two decades, another researcher critical of her decision to delay publication, and Hilary Cass.

The piece’s central implication is that, because “puberty blockers did not lead to mental health improvements” in the unpublished study data, this undermines the case for gender-affirming care.

But puberty blockers are not prescribed to “improve” mental health—as described by an Erin in the Morning (10/23/24) factcheck, they’re intended to “prevent deleterious effects of puberty.” Puberty blockers give trans kids and their families time to weigh their options and avoid poor mental health outcomes—so the way to know whether puberty blockers are effective is to compare those with dysphoria who receive them with those that do not. Olson-Kennedy’s study does not have a control group; therefore, she is concerned that her longitudinal data, which show neither increase nor decrease on average in mental health, would be misused to suggest that puberty blockers are ineffective—which is exactly what Ghorayshi’s article does.

“I do not want our work to be weaponized,” Olson-Kennedy is quoted in the article. And indeed, thanks to the New York Times, it has been: Senate Republicans soon launched an inquiry (12/5/24) into the study, heavily citing the Times article, and linking the release of study data to Britain’s restriction on gender-affirming care.

‘Tapping into fears’

Five articles were related to right-wing political attacks on trans rights, a noticeable increase from the previous study period (which ran one such article). But the increase does not reflect an improvement in coverage. Rather than looking at the impacts on trans people, the Times framed the issue primarily as a political football.

The New York Times (10/9/24) framed anti-trans “fears” as natural, pre-existing phenomena, rather than a political phenomenon that the GOP worked tirelessly to promote.

For instance, the paper published two front-page pieces on the role of trans rights in the presidential election: “Anti-Trans Ads Become Focus for the GOP” (10/9/24) and “Debating Role of Trans Rights in Harris’s Loss” (11/21/24). Each included just one trans source, and also included two guests who had their anti-trans perspectives obscured, along with two pieces of unchallenged misinformation about the biological advantages of trans girls in sports.

These pieces were much more interested in evaluating the political effectiveness of scapegoating as a campaign strategy than they were with the bigotry of the approach or the dangerous implications for the scapegoated minority in question.

National political correspondent Shane Goldmacher led with an explanation that Republican candidates are “tapping into fears about transgender women and girls in sports and about taxpayer-funded gender transitions in prisons.” That frames such “fears” as natural, pre-existing phenomena, rather than a political phenomenon that the GOP worked tirelessly to promote—and that the Times, with such coverage, is abetting.

Goldmacher continued:

Most of the Republican ads do not criticize the transgender community in general. Instead, they zero in on specific wedge cases, such as transgender women and girls in sports, transgender women’s sharing of locker rooms, the use of taxpayer funds for gender-affirming surgery for people in prison and access to transition services for minors, such as puberty blockers.

Yes, trans kids, adolescents and incarcerated people receiving gender-affirming healthcare make up a tiny proportion of the population, and transgender girls in athletics make up a negligible sum at the K-12 and collegiate levels; but how do attacks on trans people receiving healthcare and trans children participating in extracurricular activities not constitute an attack on the “transgender community in general”?

‘Trans rights in Harris’s loss’

The New York Times‘ focus (11/21/24) was on Democrats facing the “challenge” of trans rights; the much more consequential challenge—that of the existential attack by Republicans on trans people—is presented as an afterthought.

In the post-election piece by reporters Adam Nagourney and Nicholas Nehamas—whose web headline was “​​Harris Loss Has Democrats Fighting Over How to Talk About Transgender Rights”—the central question was again around political strategy: “Republicans clearly see a political opportunity,” they wrote, while for Democrats, “the question of how the party deals with transgender rights has emerged as a challenge for the years ahead.”

In this narrative, the protagonists are Democrats facing the “challenge” of trans rights; the much more consequential challenge—that of the existential attack by Republicans on trans people—is presented as an afterthought, wedged into two paragraphs at the very end of their lengthy piece: “Activists and others who work with transgender people, particularly transgender youths, say the political debate has resulted in a spike in reports of cyberbullying, online harassment and family tensions.” Nagourney and Nehamas followed this with a quote from Jaymes Black, CEO of the Trevor Project, about the “surge of calls to [the Trevor Project] crisis line.”

The paper also published two separate front-page articles covering transphobia at a Manhattan school board: “Spraying Vitriol, Parents in New York Clash Over What’s Taught” (4/5/24) and “A Culture-War Battle Roils a School Panel in Liberal Manhattan” (12/3/24).

Both pieces largely focused on arguments among parents, teachers and school officials, entirely omitting trans kids’ perspectives and including only one trans adult perspective (in the April 2024 piece). Both articles briefly quoted students expressing their concerns that enabling adult school board bullies to harass trans kids puts the “safety of the ‘most vulnerable students…at stake,’” but these students were afforded much less room to express their opinions than school board bullies themselves.

Scrutinizing trans advocates, not transphobes

This New York Times piece (11/27/24) was much more concerned with the fundamental unfairness of making people “put pronouns in their email signature” than of limiting the rights of gender and sexual minorities.

The one politics piece that centered trans people, “Trans Activists Question Tack Amid Backlash” (11/27/24), incredibly made the case that trans activists are the ones who ought to be under scrutiny at this political moment. It quoted more trans people (3) and advocates (3) combined than any other front-page article, but managed to present them in a way that raised outcry among the trans community (Erin in the Morning, 11/26/24).

“To get on the wrong side of transgender activists is often to endure their unsparing criticism,” the piece by Jeremy Peters began, and went on to describe criticisms and protests of public figures, including author J.K. Rowling, a notorious anti-trans activist, and Rep. Seth Moulton (D-Mass.), the most prominent Democrat to suggest retreating from trans rights after Democrats’ election losses. “Now, some activists say it is time to rethink and recalibrate their confrontational ways,” Peters wrote, “and are pushing back against the more all-or-nothing voices in their coalition.”

Peters characterized Rowling—the billionaire author–turned–transphobic activist, who recently founded a “women’s fund” entirely dedicated to funding anti-trans court battles—as simply saying “that denying any relationship between sex and biology was ‘deeply misogynistic and regressive.’” He was less generous with transgender activists, whom he criticized as sounding “too judgmental,” “dogmatic and intolerant” and “unreasonable.” For what, exactly? Peters pointed to social media activists who “police language,” insist “that everyone declare whether they prefer to be referred to as he, she or other pronouns,” and “put pressure on liberal candidates for office to take positions that align with theirs.”

Peters’ headline thesis (published on the web as “Transgender Activists Question the Movement’s Confrontational Approach”) hinged on exactly two trans sources. One of them, Rodrigo Heng-Lehtinen, then–executive director of Advocates for Transgender Equality, released a statement disputing the Times‘ account:

Yesterday, [the] New York Times ran an article in which I was quoted as saying, “We have to make it OK for someone to change their minds,” and “We cannot vilify them for not being on our side. No one wants to join that team.” Because my quotes were taken out of context, I’d like to clarify what I meant. Those statements were regarding how to persuade every day, undecided people in the public, not people who have already taken actions to oppose our equality.

In advising trans people to concede to bad faith arguments about how advocates are too aggressive in demanding respect, the Times prioritizes those harmed in fictitious hypotheticals over trans people harmed by transphobic narratives in real life. The piece at least includes one source who seems to understand this: Gillian Branstetter of the ACLU, who explained that such arguments attempting to “scapegoat” trans people are built upon a “fundamental unfairness.” They come, she said, from people who are not “interested in compromise and open debate.”

For the most part, however, the piece was much more concerned with the fundamental unfairness of making people “put pronouns in their email signature” than of limiting the rights of gender and sexual minorities.

Trans women (who aren’t) in women’s sports 

In coverage of transphobic harassment campaigns, the New York Times (11/29/24) has outrage to spare for the act of bullying itself: just not a critical analysis of the transphobia underpinning it.

The two sports-focused articles continued the Times‘ pattern from last year of questioning the “fairness” of trans girls competing in girls’ sports; a third culture piece focused on religion.

“Olympic Officials Try to Quell Fury Over Fairness” (8/3/24) included no transgender sources or anti-trans misinformation—or, for that matter, a single trans subject. Instead, the piece focused on the transvestigation of Olympic boxers Imane Khelif and Lin Yu-Ting, describing it as a “swirling controversy” that sparked a “fierce debate about biology, gender and fairness in women’s sports”—without connecting the overtly “political” speculation to a broader trend of rising transphobia.

It even obscured far-right, anti-LGBTQ Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s role in promoting claims that the boxers might be intersex or trans—she’d said of Khelif, “Athletes who have male genetic characteristics should not be admitted to women’s competitions” (Fox News, 8/1/24). Her opinion was reduced to her statement that the boxing match “did not seem on equal footing.”

“Volleyball Team in Grip of Fierce Debate on Transgender Rights” (11/29/24) described the “complicated mess” confronting the women’s team at San Jose State University, where, after a right-wing website outed a trans player, a co-captain and assistant coach sued the team for allowing her to play. The article didn’t attempt to combat the co-captain’s smears that the player is a “man” or her lawyer’s claim that college administrators “‘have willfully neglected their duty’ to keep sports safe and fair” by allowing trans women to play on women’s teams—though it did mention multiple times that she is not “‘the best or most dominant hitter’” on her team,  nor does she “lead any statistical category in her conference.”

(While research is limited on trans athletes’ biological advantages, analysis of existing literature comparing the physical capabilities of cis and trans women non-athletes finds that physical performance begins approaching that of cisgender women at at least two years of hormone-replacement treatments, and that there is a lack of evidence for a wholesale advantage for trans women athletes. Meanwhile, there are numerous benefits of allowing trans adolescents to play with their friends.)

Instead, while reporting the assistant coach’s claim that “she hits and blocks like a dude,” the piece sought its middle ground in the recognition that the player was also being dehumanized. The impression that readers were left with was that her participation may be unfair (though, again, she doesn’t have any advantage over her teammates), but that nonetheless, “she’s being targeted” by a “mob mentality.”

This point of analysis is not unwelcome—but doesn’t address the false premise that including a trans player somehow undermines the fairness of the whole game.

It also reinforced the false notion that the inclusion of trans athletes is a pressing issue in women’s sports, calling it “one of the most explosive issues in American life,” when in fact transgender college athletes are a negligible statistic: In December 2024, President Charlie Baker of the National Collegiate Athletic Association testified to a senate panel that of over 500,000 total college athletes, he believes that fewer than 10 are trans.

It’s clear that in coverage of transphobic harassment campaigns, the Times has outrage to spare for the act of bullying itself: just not a critical analysis of the transphobia underpinning it.

Meanwhile, “Some Christians Seek Truce in the Gender Wars” (5/18/24), by religion reporter Ruth Graham, focused on how some conservative Christian families are working to accept their trans children and offered perhaps the paper’s most nuanced front-page reporting on trans issues. It included three trans sources, one trans-allied advocate source and one allied family-member; it also quoted three transphobes and did not obfuscate their anti-trans positions.

The article included one piece of unchallenged misinformation, paraphrasing otherwise trans-sympathetic Colorado psychologist Julia Sadusky in her fears about “irreversible medical interventions” being administered to trans patients.

Such interventions are, in fact, exceedingly rare, and often deliberately mischaracterized—a small number of young teens are treated with hormone blockers, which are entirely reversible. Some older teens might undergo hormone treatments, which can cause more permanent changes, with the strict guidance of a medical team and parental consent. Vanishingly few trans minors receive surgical interventions.

Lacking analysis of transphobia

None of this is to say that the Times’ coverage hasn’t improved in some ways since 2023. This time around, FAIR found an absence of detransitioners, who in the previous study received disproportionate coverage that created a misleading picture of detransition rates.

FAIR also found that perspectives of family members of trans people were included for very different reasons from the 2023 study. While family members in the 2023 study largely served to cast doubt on the efficacy of gender-affirming care and the reality of gender-diverse experience, this time around, family members acted as advocates for their trans relatives’ interests.

However, for the most part, both quantitative and qualitative analysis finds that while the Times is aware of the outsized scrutiny that trans people received leading up to the 2024 election, the paper of record remains largely uninterested in critical coverage of transphobic scapegoating. Instead of affording trans people space to discuss how scapegoating is detrimental, especially to those most vulnerable (like trans children and their families), the Times seems much more concerned with civility and bothsidesism.

Note: The study looked at articles from the New York Times‘ print edition, as archived on the Nexis news database. The dates cited are the print dates, though the links naturally go to the online edition, typically dated a day earlier and given a different headline.

 

A FAIR study found that CNN’s primetime coverage of the Los Angeles anti-ICE protests in early June rarely included the voices of the protesters themselves. Instead, the network’s sources were overwhelmingly current and former government and law enforcement officials. The resulting coverage rarely took issue with Trump’s desire to silence the people who were defending their undocumented neighbors—but mainly debated his decision to deploy the California National Guard to do so.

FAIR recorded the sources that appeared in the 5–10 pm timeslot during two key days, June 9 and 10, of CNN’s television coverage of the Los Angeles protests; the shows included were the Lead with Jake Tapper, Erin Burnett OutFront, Anderson Cooper 360 and the Source With Kaitlan Collins.

The sources were categorized by current or former occupation, and on whether they were a featured guest—who typically field multiple interview-style questions from an anchor—or simply a soundbite. Sources that made multiple appearances were counted once for each segment they appeared in. (CNN’s in-house “analysts” or “commentators” were counted as featured guests to reflect their significant impact on the perspectives shared on the shows.)

Out of 85 total sources across the eight broadcasts, only five were protesters, appearing on just three shows. None of the 47 featured guests were protesters or community or immigrant advocates.

By far the most frequent sources were current or former US government officials, with 55 appearances—a whopping 65% of total sources. Thirteen additional sources were law enforcement, and five were current or former military. Together, these official sources accounted for 86% of all appearances. (There were also three journalists, two lawyers and two partisan strategists.)

Of featured guest and analyst interviews, current or former government officials dominated at 49% (23 out of 47). These sources were given the most time to present their perspectives, shaping the narrative around the protests and the government responses. Another 11 featured guests were law enforcement and two were military, so official sources accounted for 77% of all such interviews. The three journalists, two lawyers and two partisan strategists made up the remaining featured guests.

‘Verbally at least hostile’

CNN‘s Kyung Lah (6/9/25) covers protests at LA’s Federal Building—while giving no sign of talking to any protesters.

CNN’s made-for-TV, on-the-ground style of protest coverage in the days following the Ambiance Apparel and Home Depot ICE raids felt little different from when Anderson Cooper stands around in a raincoat during a hurricane. Only this time, CNN reporters were braving an uncontrollable storm of Angelenos.

Much like Cooper’s coat, CNN senior investigative correspondent Kyung Lah (Erin Burnett OutFront, 6/9/25) donned protective goggles—useful should she have encountered tear gas, but also undoubtedly a dramatic flourish perfect for one of CNN’s 30-second TV spots.

That CNN was primarily interested in drama rather than helping viewers understand the protests became abundantly clear as—even with her protective goggles—Lah made no apparent effort to interview any protesters as she and CNN anchor Erin Burnett stood in front of LA’s federal detention center, where federal agents, LAPD and the California National Guard were in a standoff with demonstrators. Instead, they kept a close eye on every thrown water bottle, expressing concern about the crowd’s increasingly “young” demographic as the day went on. “This is a much younger crowd, certainly, verbally at least, Erin, hostile,” Lah reported.

The only protest voices that CNN’s audience heard from throughout both days of primetime coverage came in the form of two brief soundbites captured by correspondent Jason Carroll (Lead, 6/9/25) at a protest for the release of arrested SEIU leader David Huerta the morning of June 9.

Araceli Martinez, the only named protester in the study period with a soundbite on CNN ( 6/9/25).

Araceli Martinez, the only protester identified by name, offered a call to action for all Americans, arguing that the Trump administration’s immigration raids are a threat to “the rights of all people, not just the immigrants, but all of us.” That soundbite reaired on Erin Burnett Outfront and Anderson Cooper 360, both on June 9.

Another protester at the demonstration demanding Huerta’s release had this to say, with the soundbite reairing on Anderson Cooper 360, also on June 9:

We are part of that immigrant community that has made L.A. great, that has made the state of California the fourth largest economy in the world today. So, we have a message for President Donald Trump. Get the National Guardsmen out of here.

Multiple times during the first day studied, Lah held up that union-led protest as a standard of message discipline and nonviolent tactics that those outside the federal building, later in the day, weren’t measuring up to. The folks at the earlier protest were “a very different slice of Los Angeles than what I am seeing” at the federal building, Lah said. The key word there is “seeing,” as she did not interview a single protester on camera.

‘We do very good here with unrest’

CNN‘s Jake Tapper (6/10/25) interviews Rep. Adam Smith, who agrees that “you should meet any sort of violent protest with law enforcement.”

Meanwhile, CNN brought on multiple featured guests who framed protesters as violent and law enforcement as the ones pushing for accountability—despite the fact that reported injuries of civilians by law enforcement far outnumbered those of law enforcement by protesters (FAIR.org, 6/13/25). LA District Attorney Nathan Hochman (OutFront, 6/10/25), for example, stated that he would work to “punish” all protesters who engage in “illegal conduct.”

Similarly, California Lt. Gov. Eleni Kounalakis (Source, 6/10/25) warned “anyone who goes out and is protesting in a way that is not peaceful…state and local and regional law enforcement will hold people accountable.”

Rep. Adam Smith told Jake Tapper (Lead, 6/10/25): “I don’t disagree that you should meet any sort of violent protest with law enforcement, but there’s no evidence in this case that the LAPD wasn’t doing that.” Once you parse the double negatives, it’s clear that Smith, like the rest of CNN‘s official sources, accepted the characterization of protesters as violent and argued that the response of California law enforcement was perfectly appropriate.

Most of these state and local government sources were responding to questions about Trump calling in the National Guard and Marines; they were defending the local law enforcement response and challenging Trump’s decision.

CNN‘s Erin Burnett (6/9/25) interviews LA County Sheriff Robert Luna, who assures her his forces were “very good here with unrest.”

One of Burnett’s featured guests, for instance, was LA County Sheriff Robert Luna (OutFront, 6/9/25)—the leader of a police force that community activists say routinely collaborates with federal immigration raids (Democracy Now!, 6/9/25), and had just sparred with demonstrators in the Home Depot parking lot in Compton following the failed ICE raid there (New York Times, 6/14/25).

The primary focus of Burnett’s line of questioning was geared at exposing the political nature of Trump’s calling in the national guard:

Just a very simple question. Do you need the Marines? Do you need the National Guard right now? Or if you were looking at this situation and assessing it as sheriff of LA County, would you say you do not need them?

That’s certainly a critical line of questioning to get at the issue of federal overreach. But Burnett failed to similarly question (or even acknowledge) the violence by local law enforcement—which, by the time of Burnett’s broadcast, included 24 attacks on journalists with weapons like pepper balls, rubber bullets and tear gas canisters, according to Reporters Without Borders (FAIR.org, 6/13/25).

Instead, she left unchallenged Luna’s claims that “if they’re peacefully protesting, they’ll be allowed to do that,” that his utmost priority was “keeping our community safe,” and that his police force does “very good here with unrest.”

In doing so, Burnett framed the story as a question of whether putting down protests against sweeping raids of undocumented workers was the responsibility of federal troops or local law enforcement—rather than questioning why such protests were being met with force, and why local officials weren’t doing more to protect their immigrant communities.

Redefining safety

Democracy Now! (6/9/25) broadened the conversation by allowing protesters like Ron Gochez to take part in it.

Meanwhile, the protesters that received such little consideration from Burnett and CNN could have contributed to a very different definition of safety for CNN’s viewers. Ron Gochez, a community organizer and social studies teacher, who was one of the protesters at the ICE raid on Ambiance Apparel, described on Democracy Now! (6/9/25) how the protests have managed to protect people despite the efforts of local and federal officials:

When we have these protests, they have been peaceful. But when the repression comes from the state, whether it’s the sheriffs, the LAPD or, on Saturday, for example, in Paramount, California, it was the Border Patrol, it was brutal violence….

But what they didn’t think was going to happen was that the people would resist and would fight back. And that’s exactly what happened in Paramount and in Compton, California, where for eight-and-a-half hours, the people combatted in the streets against the Border Patrol…. They had to retreat because of the fierce resistance of the community. And the hundreds of workers that were in the factories around them were able to escape. They were able to go to their cars and go home. That was only thanks to the resistance that allowed them to go home that night.

The Trump administration is intent on testing just how far it can go to crush political dissent, and it’s clear most Democratic politicians and local law enforcement are not going to bat for the most vulnerable communities in its crosshairs. Angelenos know they are fighting for the rights of all of us who reside in the US. But CNN’s refusal to have them on air to discuss their struggle and explain their tactics makes it all the more difficult to raise public awareness. Pretending to challenge the deployment of federal troops, CNN normalizes police violence and silences those truly protecting their communities.

 

Janine Jackson interviewed RootsAction’s Jeff Cohen and Norman Solomon about Zohran Mamdani and the Democratic Party for the July 4, 2025, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin250704CohenSolomon.mp3

 

New York (5/20/25)

Janine Jackson: In early June, Raina Lipsitz explained for FAIR.org how media can write about a political candidate in a way that sows doubt about their fitness without attacking them directly. “How to Subtly Undermine a Promising Left-Wing Candidate,” it was headlined.

Since then, Zohran Mamdani, who New York magazine described as “Crash[ing] the Party,” has won the Democratic mayoral primary here in New York City, and things have got a lot less subtle. We have billionaire hedge fund manager Bill Ackman declaring that he will bankroll anyone—you hear that? anyone—who will keep Mamdani out of office. Breaking news as we record, Ackman has said current Mayor Eric Adams will be recipient of his riches—not, as he’s declared, due to any particular fitness on Adams’ part, but because he fills the brief of not being Zohran Mamdani.

Suffice to say, fissures are being revealed, lines are being drawn. And whatever you think of Mamdani or New York City in particular, the question of whether the Democratic Party, as it is, wants to be a part of the future or not is on the table.

And here’s the thing: Plenty of people are not being scared off by the idea that things could change. Elite media have no place in their brain for this concept, and we can expect to confront coverage reflecting that.

Joining me now to talk about this revealing, interesting moment are two people near and dear. Jeff Cohen is the founder of FAIR, founding director of the Park Center for Independent Media at Ithaca College, author of Cable News Confidential and many other things.

Norman Solomon, also in at FAIR’s founding, is executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy, and author of numerous titles, including War Made Invisible: How America Hides the Human Toll of Its Military Machine, out in a new paperback edition.

They are, together, co-founders of the independent initiative RootsAction, where Jeff is policy director and Norman is national director. They both join me now by phone from wherever they are. Jeff and Norman, welcome back to CounterSpin.

Norman Solomon: Thanks a lot, Janine.

Jeff Cohen: Great to be with you.

New York Times (6/16/25)

JJ: They’re talking about Mamdani, but they’re telling us about themselves, and the values they represent all the time. I’m talking about news media.

So it’s worth taking a second to breathe in this New York Times editorial; I call it the “sniff heard round the world”: “He is a democratic socialist who too often ignores the unavoidable trade-offs of governance.”

There’s just one sentence, but there’s a lot to unpack. The “trade-offs” for good governance: It’s hard to think of a clearer example of media’s transmission of the idea that somehow politics isn’t really for people. So, Jeff, Norman, why would anyone ask why people are disaffected with electoral politics, when this is the smart person’s explanation of how they work?

JC: It’s pretty revealing when you look at New York Times editorials, because I think middle-of-the-road news consumers, liberal news consumers, they know not to trust Fox News, owned by Rupert Murdoch, or Murdoch’s New York Post. People understand that’s right-wing propaganda.

The moment we’re in, Janine, as you’re suggesting, it’s a teachable moment. Now people are realizing you can’t trust the New York Times, either. You can’t trust these corporate centrist news outlets.

You bring up a Times editorial. Last August, the Times said that they were no longer going to make endorsements in local or state races, but eight days before this primary election, they wrote an editorial that you would’ve thought they wrote so that the billionaires who were funding Cuomo, with this dark money Super PAC known as Fix the City, that was funded by Michael Bloomberg, it was funded by DoorDash, it was funded by Bill Ackman, the hedge fund guy….

It’s almost like the New York Times wrote an editorial attacking Mamdani, after they said they would no longer be making endorsements in local races, it’s almost like they were writing it so they could provide ad copy to Fix the City and attack ads.

Norman Solomon: “Chief Justice John Jay…said, ‘Those who own the country ought to govern it.’ And that’s really the tacit assumption and belief from the huge media.” (Photo: Cheryl Higgins.)

And I watched the NBA, the pro basketball playoffs, on WABC, channel 7 New York City, and they kept quoting the editorial in the attack ads against Zohran Mamdani. And one of the quotes was, “He’s got an agenda uniquely unsuited to the city’s challenges.” Another quote, “He shows little concern about the disorder of the past decade.” And then, “We do not believe Mr. Mamdani deserves a spot on New Yorker’s ballots.” So you had quote after quote.

When the editorial writers of the New York Times are writing an attack on a mayoral candidate like Zohran Mamdani, and they know that there’s a dark money PAC that’s spending millions of dollars to attack him—basically, they were writing copy. And every time a coach during the NBA playoffs called a timeout, I cringed, because I knew there’d be another attack ad that I’d be watching against Mamdani.

NS: To get into the sports metaphor, in the news department, they’re supposed to be referees; they don’t have their hands on the scale. They’re simply reporting the news. But the tonality of coverage, not just in the New York Times, but elite media generally, has been skeptical to alarmed to setting off the sirens that something terrible might be about to happen if the New York City voters don’t wake up.

And when the New York Times editorials talk about something like trade-offs, what they mean is that there is a transactional world that they believe is about democracy, or should be, their version of democracy. I recalled the statement from the first Supreme Court Chief Justice John Jay, who said, “Those who own the country ought to govern it.” And that’s really the tacit assumption and belief from the huge media that, after all, have billions of dollars in assets. That’s what they are accustomed to trying to look out for and protect. I think it’s notable that there’s a long pattern, I mean this has been going for decades.

The New York Times (6/24/20) on how “workers have been left behind.”

And, again, we’re talking about Fox News and so forth, we’re talking about the New York Times, and in its editorials, the wisdom of its handpicked and, we’re told, very well-informed, erudite editorial board—-a few years ago when Bernie Sanders was surging in the primaries, and it looked like he might be the Democratic presidential nominee, the New York Times went into overdrive of alarm. They published a very big editorial saying Bernie Sanders is just not qualified to be president. He’s dangerous. These socialistic ideas just won’t work.

And after that, years went by, and the New York Times ran a huge editorial about how horrible it is that there’s so much income inequality in the United States, and it’s getting worse and worse, the gap between the very wealthy and the middle class and the poor.

And I think that is really a replica of the split screen approach of the New York Times and the media establishment, which is, on the one hand, to make sure that progressive candidates don’t get very far, if they have anything to say about it as news media outlets. And on the other hand, it’s sort of victims without victimizers, the moaning that there’s poverty and there’s income inequality that’s become so extreme, but there are no victimizers, and certainly Wall Street should be protected rather than attacked.

JC: The beauty of the Mamdani campaign—multiethnic, multigenerational—is there were thousands and thousands of volunteers knocking on doors, and many of them are young. This reminds me of the Bernie Sanders campaign that Norman brought up. Many of them are getting a real education that you can’t trust the right-wing media, and you also can’t trust the media that sees itself as corporate center or corporate liberal.

I love, in the editorial of the Times, eight days before the primary: “Many New Yorkers are understandably disappointed by the Democratic field.” Well, there were some New Yorkers disappointed: It was the New York Times editorial board, which was blasting Mamdani, but they couldn’t, as they usually do, endorse the corporate centrist Cuomo, or be nice to him, because of all of his scandals.

But when it comes to New Yorkers as a whole, they were pretty enthused by the Democratic field, because voter turnout was the biggest in 36 years. So I think what we’re getting here is a real education about how the media spectrum is center-right, including from the New York Times to the New York Post, from the Washington Post to the Washington Times, from MSNBC to Fox News, it’s basically a center-right spectrum. And when a candidate is outside of that spectrum, proposing ideas that are rarely heard inside the center-right spectrum, and is popular, that’s when even the corporate liberal, the corporate centrist media, freak out.

Truthout (6/27/25)

JJ: The first tool in the quiver is blatant Islamophobia. Folks will have seen Senator Gillibrand’s unhinged rant. And we see the distortion and the weaponization of antisemitism. And I just wonder, Norman, Jeff, what you have to say about the idea of using antisemitism as somehow a go-to to attack a candidate who has made very clear—and I mean, again, it’s not about Mamdani, it’s just about the utility of this tool to pull out against anyone who’s trying to do anything different.

NS: It’s really a very strong, powerful and pernicious combination of the zeal to, at all costs, protect corporate power and to protect Israel, which, after all, Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch both unequivocally reported last December, continues to engage in genocide in Gaza. So this is a very powerful and I think dangerous confluence of the concentration of power in the United States.

And all you have to do is read the screed that was put out, hours after Zohran Mamdani won the primary, by Bill Ackman, whose net worth is upward of $9 billion. And the accusation, and I’m quoting here, was “socialism has no place in the economic capital of our country,” and also accusing Mamdani of being anti-Israel and antisemitic. And so that combination is really part of the—I won’t say witches brew, it’s a warlock’s brew of the power structure in the capital of capitalism in the United States, in New York City.

And we’re seeing this in so many different guises, certainly in media, it is pervasive, whether it is the New York Times or the Washington Times or the Wall Street Journal, that’s a part of the theme. And it’s also coming from the power structure of the Democratic Party. The two most prominent New Yorkers in Congress, both, as we speak, are refusing to endorse Zohran Mamdani, even though they are Democrats, he’s a Democrat.

And we’ve had, for instance, the House minority leader, Hakeem Jeffries, of course from New York City, saying that when he’s asked whether he’s going to endorse, the reply is, Well, Mamdani has to show New Yorkers that his Jewish residents of New York City are people who he wants to protect. Well, that’s preposterous, and it’s really a way of saying that if you are not supporting Israel with its genocide, then we have reasons to think that you wouldn’t protect Jews, which is an absurdity with an agenda. It’s part of a decades-long scam in media and politics in the United States that equates Israel with Judaism, and Israel with quote “the Jewish people.”

JJ: And that erases masses of New York Jewish people and Jewish people around the country; they’re completely erased in this conversation, as though they were not speaking their truth and their values and their opposition to Israeli actions.

New York Times (6/25/25)

JC: Janine, there was a New York Times news story the day after Mamdani won the primary, and it had this reference that Mamdani’s “running on a far-left agenda, including positions that once were politically risky in New York—like describing Israel’s actions in Gaza as genocide, calling for new taxes on business.”

Well, FAIR has pointed out that, for decades, the polls have shown that even though we have a very narrow debate in mainstream media between center and right, that on economic issues, the public is very progressive. So Pew did a poll in March, 63% of all US adults want taxes raised on large businesses and corporations. It’s been that way for decades. And the New York Times is telling us that’s “far-left” or “politically risky”?

And then, on the issue of Israel, the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs did a poll of US Jews 14 months ago, May of last year, and found that back then, 30% of US Jews and 38% of US Jews under the age of 44, they were calling what Israel was doing in Gaza genocide. Those numbers are much huger now. So there are a couple million Jews in the US that are calling what Israel is doing in Gaza “genocide.”

And yet in so many Mamdani articles, I see this comment, “He has emphatically denied accusations that he is antisemitic,” but yet the New York Times and other news coverage keeps emphasizing it.

We have evidence from Trump’s comments and Trump’s policies about his racism; but you don’t see, in every other article or every third article, “Mr. Trump has emphatically denied accusations that he is a racist.” But you keep hearing this in Mamdani coverage, and there’s no evidence at all that he’s antisemitic. He’s just critical of Israeli action in Gaza and elsewhere, as are millions of Jews in this country and around the world.

New York Times (3/18/25)

NS: And very much, this kind of media coverage and messaging, it’s a toxic combination of Islamophobia and willingness to promote Israel as some kind of paragon of virtue, even while the genocide continues. I think there’s no clearer incarnation of this mix than Chuck Schumer, the minority leader in the Senate, the most powerful Democrat, arguably, in the country. And a few months ago, Chuck Schumer, in an interview with a very approving Bret Stephens, the columnist of the New York Times, said, and I quote, “My job is to keep the left pro-Israel.” Well, if that’s Chuck Schumer’s job, he clearly is falling short; he’s falling down on the job. And there’s a real panic here.

And then the other clearer aspect of what Chuck Schumer is providing nationally, in terms of politics and media, is his well-earned nickname, “the senator from Wall Street.” And that has been a nickname that he got decades ago. It got new heights just after the financial crisis of 2008. By the following year, the fall of 2009, he had received more than 15% of all the year’s contributions to every senator, from Wall Street.

And when you look at the last year’s donations, when the Schumer campaign committee had to report to the FEC, the six-year donor total for Schumer was $43 million. And more than a quarter of that just came from the financial sector, the real estate interest and law firms and lawyers.

Well, clearly, the real estate interests are going crazy right now, because they’re afraid of a rent freeze. They’re afraid of social justice. They want their outlandish profits to be remaining in full force. So this is really a class war being waged, through media and politics, from the top down.

JJ: And the energy that we get is very much “let’s you and him fight,” you know? Racism, Islamophobia and, yes, antisemitism are all tools that powerful rich people take up to protect their power and riches. It’s much beyond Mamdani, it’s beyond Bernie Sanders. It’s beyond any individual candidate. They will pit us against one another, and then maybe we won’t notice that we’re being robbed blind. That’s the big picture, in some ways.

JC: Agreed. The threat of Mamdani is he’s such a unifier, and that people of various ethnicities, generations, they’ve united behind him. They heard his message, in spite of the millions of dollars of attack ads, and mainstream media seem to be freaking out, from right to center.

Rising Up (7/2/25)

JJ: I think it’s important to understand that he’s not a unicorn. Sonali Kolhatkar had a show the other day: Across the country, there are people, there are candidates, rising up. There are people who are unapologetic, and they’re resisting the nightmare that you can put Trump’s face on, but it’s not his alone. We know it’s a bigger systemic problem.

We’re talking about Mamdani. Mamdani is not alone. There are folks rising up.

And let me just say, finally, we’re talking about a void, in terms of public understanding and information and energy, and it’s a void that you both have long identified. And that’s why RootsAction exists, right? It’s like people are tired of “Democrat versus Republican,” and want a place to put their energy that is neither of those.

NS: Yeah. Well, the media and corporate power structures, that are so interlaced, to put it mildly, they see genuine democracy as a terrible danger, and any semblance of horizontal discourse in media and politics, and people organizing and communicating with each other, that’s just a terrible threat to the hold that the gazillionaires have on the political process.

Jeff Cohen: “These billionaires believe that there should be only two choices, and they should both be acceptable to the billionaires.” (Creative Commons photo: Jim Naureckas.)

JC: These billionaires believe that there should be only two choices, and they should both be acceptable to the billionaires.

So you had AIPAC, powerful Israel-right-or-wrong lobby, intervening in Democratic primaries with Republican money, and knocking out progressive congressmembers like Jamaal Bowman in New York and Cori Bush in Missouri. And once you knock out the progressive candidate, and you’ve chosen the Democrat and you’re a right-wing lobby, AIPAC, which loves the Republicans, well, you have both candidates in the race, you cannot lose. That’s not democracy.

And mainstream media understands that’s not democracy when they’re always pointing out, accurately, that the supreme leader of Iran gets to choose and sanction who gets to run for president, who doesn’t. Well, if you’re these billionaires, they believe they should choose both choices for you, and limit those choices, and they freak out when there’s more than just the two choices that they like.

JJ: And then I would say, media make it their job to pretend that, actually, you’re choosing from all the available, reasonable options.

JC: Yeah, if ever there was a time for news media, and thank God we have independent news outlets in New York and elsewhere, and we have nonprofit news outlets in New York and elsewhere. This is a really educational moment about how flawed the democratic system is, how the democracy is so constrained by this money.

And who never complains about campaign finance? The television channels that get all the money from the billionaires to attack a Mamdani in favor of a Cuomo. And now we’re going to get millions of dollars of ads against Mamdani in favor of a very corrupt incumbent Mayor Eric Adams.

But, again, this should be an educational moment about how limited democracy is, and journalists should be explaining the problems of democracy, when the billionaires can have this much power over every aspect of the race.

NS: As we’ve been saying, this is a teachable moment, and it’s a learnable moment. And so many people are learning that the gazillionaires are freaking out.

JJ: We’ve been speaking with authors, activists, RootsAction’s co-founders Jeff Cohen and Norman Solomon. You can start with their work online at RootsAction.org. It will not end there. Thank you, both Jeff and Norman, for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

JC: Thank you, Janine.

NS: Thanks a lot, Janine.

 

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Intercept (7/8/25)

This week on CounterSpin: Along with many other hate-driven harms, the budget bill puts Stephen Miller’s cruel and bizarre mass deportation plan on steroids. $45 billion for building new immigration detention centers; that’s a 62% larger budget than the entire federal prison system.

The goons hiding their faces and IDs while they snatch people off the street? ICE’s “enforcement and deportation operations” get $30 billion. $46 billion for a “border wall,” because that’s evidently not a cartoon. And in a lesser-noticed piece: While courts are backlogged with immigrants complying with legal processes to access citizenship, the bill caps the number of immigration judges to 800, ensuring more people will be kept in vulnerable legal status.

The Economic Policy Institute tells us that increases in immigration enforcement will cause widespread job losses for both immigrant and US-born workers, particularly in construction and childcare: “While Trump and other conservatives claim that increased deportations will somehow magically create jobs for US-born workers, the existing evidence shows that the opposite is true: They will cause immense harm to workers and families, shrink the economy, and weaken the labor market for everyone.”

That’s without mentioning how ICE is telling people they’re being moved from Texas to Louisiana and then dumping them in South Sudan, as the Intercept’s Nick Turse reports. Or the puerile delight Republicans find in holding people in an alligator swamp, and forbidding journalists and public officials from seeing what goes on there.

It’s important to see that Donald Trump, while especially craven, is using tools he was given, in terms of the apparatus for mass deportations, including in the acceptance of prisons as economic boons for struggling localities. So the fight can’t be just anti-Trump, but must be rooted in policy and practice and law—and most of all, in community and shared humanity.

We’ll talk about standing up for human beings because they’re human beings with Silky Shah, executive director of Detention Watch Network.

https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin250711Shah.mp3

 

Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at recent press coverage of the Texas floods.

https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin250711Banter.mp3

 

Salon (7/3/25): “The funds going towards deportation would…be enough to fully fund the program to end world hunger for four years.”

And so it has come to pass: US President Donald Trump’s “big, beautiful bill” has set the stage for tax cuts for the rich, slashed services for the poor, and a host of other things that qualify as “beautiful” in the present dystopia. Some cuts, like those to Medicaid, have been heavily covered by the corporate media. But one key piece of the bill has gotten much less media scrutiny: The preposterous sum of $175 billion has been allocated to fund Trump’s signature mass deportation campaign, which, as a Salon article (7/3/25) points out, exceeds the military budget for every single country in the world aside from the US and China.

Approximately $30 billion of that is destined directly for US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the goons who have recently made a name for themselves by going around in masks and kidnapping people. This constitutes a threefold increase over ICE’s previous budget, and propels the outfit to the position of the largest US federal law enforcement agency in history. $45 billion will go toward building new ICE detention centers, including family detention centers.

Prior to the signing into law of the sweeping bill on July 4, US Vice President JD Vance took to X to highlight what really mattered in the legislation:

Everything else—the CBO [Congressional Budget Office] score, the proper baseline, the minutiae of the Medicaid policy—is immaterial compared to the ICE money and immigration enforcement provisions.

Scant attention to ICE expansion

“What happens if we spend more than the military budget of Russia on deportation?” was not a question the New York Times (7/3/25) thought needed answering.

And yet many US corporate media outlets have paid scant attention to this aspect of the bill and refrained from delving too deeply into the matter of what exactly this massive ramping up of ICE portends for American society. According to a search of the Nexis news database, while half (50%) of newspaper articles and news transcripts mentioning the reconciliation bill from its first passage in the House (May 20) to its signing into law (July 4) also mentioned Medicaid, less than 6% named Immigration and Customs Enforcement or ICE.

Even many of those that did mention ICE barely gave it any attention. On July 3, for example, the New York Times presented readers with “Nine Questions About the Republican Megabill, Answered,” which in response to the first question—“Why is it being called a megabill?”—did manage to mention “a 150% boost to the Immigration and Customs Enforcement budget over the next five years.” However, there was no further discussion in the article’s remaining 1,500-plus words of potential ramifications of this boost—although there was a section devoted to the “tax break for Native Alaskan subsistence whaling captains.”

That was more than CNN’s intervention managed, also published on July 3, and headlined “Here’s Who Stands to Gain From the ‘Big, Beautiful Bill.’ And Who May Struggle.” The article aced a couple of no-brainers, including that “corporate America” would be “better off” thanks to the bill, while “low-income Americans” would be “worse off.” But there was not a single reference to the ICE budget—or who might “struggle” because of it.

‘Detention blitz’

Washington Post (7/4/25): “Immigrant rights advocates are imploring the government not to award more contracts to…companies they say have failed to provide safe accommodations and adequate medical care to detainees.”

This is not to imply, of course, that there are no articles detailing what ICE has been up to in terms of persecuting refuge seekers, visa holders, legal US residents and even US citizens—who supposedly have greater protections under the law—and how all of this stands to get worse, in accordance with the impending deluge of anti-immigration funds.

In its report on ICE’s looming “detention blitz,” the Washington Post (7/4/25) noted that “at least 10 immigrants died while in ICE’s custody during the first half of this year,” and cited the finding that ICE is “now arresting people with no criminal charges at a higher rate than people charged with crimes.”

The Post article also contained sufficiently thought-provoking details to enable the conscientious reader to draw their own conclusions regarding the ultimate purpose of manic detention schemes. (Hint: it’s not to keep America “safe.”) For instance, we learn that the share prices of GEO Group and CoreCivic—the two largest detention companies contracted by ICE, which have notorious reputations for detainee mistreatment—“each rose about 3%… as investors cheered the passage of congressional funding likely to result in a flurry of new contracts.”

Lest there remain any doubt as to the centrality of profit flows to the immigration crackdown, the article specifies that GEO Group and CoreCivic “each gave $500,000 to President Donald Trump’s inauguration, according to Federal Election Commission data.”

This article, however, came after the legislation was passed.

A Post opinion piece (6/30/25), meanwhile, put a human face on some of ICE’s victims, such as Jermaine Thomas, born to a US soldier on a military base in Germany. Following an incident of “suspected trespassing” in Texas, Thomas was deported by ICE to Jamaica, a country he had never set foot in. Other victims spotlighted by the Post include 64-year-old Iranian immigrant Madonna Kashanian, nabbed while gardening at her house in New Orleans, and a six-year-old Honduran boy with leukemia who was arrested at an immigration court in California while pursuing his asylum case with his family.

It was also possible, if one sought it out, to find reporting on what the cash infusion entails from a logistical perspective: more agents, more arrests, more racial profiling, increased detention capacity, and a deportation system that runs “like Amazon, trying to get your product delivered in 24 hours,” as ICE’s acting director Todd Lyons charmingly put it.

‘Police state first’

Aaron Reichlin-Melnick (Jacobin, 7/3/25): “Mass deportation wouldn’t only reshape American society and cause the economy to go into a tailspin. It would also lead to a very different relationship between the US populace and law enforcement.”

Gutting Medicaid is certainly an angle on the reconciliation bill that deserved the media attention it got, and will devastate millions in this country. But the massive infusion of money and power to ICE will likewise devastate millions with a ballooning police state that unleashes terror, rips apart families and creates a network of concentration camps across the country. Given ICE’s contemporary track record and de facto exemption from the constraints of due process, the public desperately needs a media that will connect the dots in order to convey a bigger-picture look of what America is up against.

In an interview with Jacobin magazine (7/3/25) on how “ICE Is About to Get More Money Than It Can Spend,” Aaron Reichlin-Melnick—a senior fellow at the American Immigration Council—made the crucial observation: “You don’t build the mass deportation machine without building the police state first.”

This is precisely the analysis that is missing from corporate media coverage of the bill. Beyond making life hell for the undocumented workers on whose very labor the US economy depends, ICE has become a tool for political repression as well—as evidenced by a slew of recent episodes involving the abduction and disappearance of international scholars whose political opinions did not coincide with those of the commander in chief of our, um, democracy.

Take the case of 30-year-old Rümeysa Öztürk, a Turkish doctoral student and Fulbright scholar studying childhood development at Tufts University in Massachusetts. While walking to an iftar dinner in March, Öztürk was accosted by six plainclothes officers, some of them masked, and forced into an unmarked van, after which she was flown halfway across the country to an ICE detention center in Louisiana. Her crime, apparently, was to have co-written an opinion piece last year for the Tufts Daily (3/26/24), in which she and her co-authors encouraged the university to accede to demands by the Tufts Community Union Senate by recognizing the Israeli genocide in the Gaza Strip and divesting from companies with ties to Israel.

Öztürk’s case is hardly an isolated one. There’s Badar Khan Suri, a postdoctoral researcher at Georgetown University who was seized by masked agents outside his Virginia home and swept off to an ICE facility in Texas. There’s Momodou Taal, a British-Gambian former PhD student at Cornell who sued the Trump administration over the crackdown on Palestine solidarity and then self-deported, explaining that he had “lost faith [he] could walk the streets without being abducted.” And the list goes on (Al Jazeera, 5/15/25).

‘Homegrowns are next’

Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor (NPR, 4/15/25): The Trump administration believes it “could deport and incarcerate any person, including US citizens, without legal consequence, so long as it does so before a court can intervene.”

In the twisted view of the US government, of course, opposing the US-backed genocide of Palestinians equals support for “terrorism”—and in Trump’s view, basically anything that goes against his own thinking and policies potentially constitutes a criminal offense. It follows that Öztürk-style politically motivated kidnappings by the state are presumably merely the top of a very slippery slope that US citizens, too, will soon find themselves careening down—especially as Trump has already exhibited enthusiasm at the prospect of outsourcing the incarceration of US citizens to El Salvador: “The homegrowns are next,” he told Salvadoran autocrat Nayib Bukele.

The line between citizens and residents has been intentionally blurred, with the Trump Justice Department announcing it was “Prioritizing Denaturalization”—that is, stripping citizenship from foreign-born citizens. This draconian punishment has been proposed for Trump’s political enemies, from New York mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani to former BFF Elon Musk. Trump has also taken aim at the constitutional right of birthright citizenship, potentially turning millions of other Americans into ICE targets.

Somehow, the elite media have not deemed it necessary to dwell even superficially on the implications of super-funding a rogue agency that has essentially been given carte blanche to indiscriminately round people up—be they undocumented workers, political dissidents, or just somebody who “looks like somebody we are looking for.” As for CNN’s write-up on “who stands to gain from the ‘big, beautiful bill,’” it’s definitely not all the folks currently living in a permanent state of fear, deprived of basic freedoms like movement, speech and thought.

 

 

This Mr. Fish cartoon (Scheer Post, 12/5/23) was called antisemitic because in calling attention to the Israeli army’s ongoing and very real killing of more than 17,000 children, it might evoke associations with the false trope used across centuries that Jews killed children in religious rituals.

Cartoonist Mr. Fish (real name Dwayne Booth) posted an update to his Patreon on March 20 headed “Fish: Laid Off!” Fish’s work has accompanied columns by Chris Hedges, appeared in Harper’s Magazine and currently can be found on ScheerPost. He collaborated with Ralph Nader to create The Day the Rats Vetoed Congress, a fable of a citizen uprising against Washington corruption. Fish announced he had been laid off from the Annenberg School of Communication at the University of Pennsylvania after teaching there for 11 years. Fish states that, officially, “the reason for the termination was budgetary.”

Unofficially, Fish has been subject to an assault stoked by right-wing media since last February. The Washington Free Beacon (2/1/24) fired the starting gun with its piece, “Penn Lecturer Is Behind Grotesque Antisemitic Cartoons.” Writer Jessica Costescu freely conflates criticism of Israel with antisemitism in her piece. She includes as antisemitic a cartoon of accused war criminal Benjamin Netanyahu as a “butcher holding a long knife and a crumpled Palestinian flag,” and another showing “an Israeli holding a gun to a hospitalized baby’s head.”

Even more serious is the charge Costescu makes that Fish evokes the “blood libel,” the myth that Jews murdered Christian children to use in religious rituals, via a cartoon of American and Israeli leaders drinking cups of blood labeled “Gaza.” Fish maintains he was “playing off of the New Yorker style” in drawing “upper-crust power brokers,” and that he was unaware of the blood libel myth (Real News Network, 5/6/25).

Costescu claims that other Fish cartoons are antisemitic because they compare Israeli policies to those of Nazi Germany. She cites one showing soldiers marching under a combination Nazi and Israeli flag, and another showing prisoners in a concentration camp holding signs reading “Gaza, the World’s Biggest Concentration Camp” and “Stop the Holocaust in Gaza.”

‘A Holocaust in Gaza’

Another cartoon by Mr. Fish (Scheer Post, 11/11/23) was called antisemitic because it depicted an IDF soldier holding a gun to the head of a baby. Medical personnel in Gaza report frequently treating children who have been shot in the head by Israeli snipers (Guardian, 4/2/24).

It’s hard to maintain that comparing Israeli policies to Nazism is antisemitic when Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir belonged to Lehi, a Zionist militant group so sympathetic to fascism that it offered to ally with Germany during World War II. In 1948, Albert Einstein, Hannah Arendt and others wrote a letter to the New York Times (12/4/48) criticizing the right-wing Freedom Party (Herut), home of future Prime Minister Menachem Begin, for similarity “in its organization, methods, political philosophy and social appeal to the Nazi and Fascist parties.” The Freedom Party was one of the major parties that allied to form Likud in 1973, the faction that has governed Israel for most of the last 50 years.

Pre–October 7, an editorial in Haaretz (10/3/23) warned that “neo-fascism in Israel seriously threatens Israelis and Palestinians alike.”

Israeli politicians and public figures have not shied away from using genocidal rhetoric that compares with Nazi propaganda during the Final Solution. Yitzhak Kroizer of the Jewish Power party (Guardian, 1/3/24) proclaimed: “The Gaza Strip should be flattened, and for all of them there is but one sentence, and that is death.”

Israeli parliamentarian Moshe Feiglin (Middle East Eye, 5/21/25) said in May: “Every child in Gaza is the enemy. We need to occupy Gaza and settle it, and not a single Gazan child will be left there. There is no other victory.”

Israeli TV presenter Elad Barashi (New Arab, 5/5/25) made the parallels explicit when he called for “a Holocaust in Gaza.” He maintained he couldn’t “understand the people here in the State of Israel who don’t want to fill Gaza with gas showers…or train cars.”

‘Antisemitism forever!’

Cartoonist Henry Payne (Andrews McMeel, 3/17/25) responded to the Trump administration’s arrest of Mahmoud Khalil for protesting genocide by suggesting that Khalil was akin to Hitler.

If Israeli military and political actions are off-limits to comparisons to the Nazis in the field of cartoons, the same is not true for Palestinians. This creates a situation where the Israeli government perpetrating a genocide, per Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, cannot be compared to the Nazis, but the Palestinians—the victims of the same genocide—can.

Since our last survey of anti-Palestinian cartooning (FAIR.org, 3/27/25), some of those profiled have continued to paint pro-Palestine protests as Nazi-like or inherently antisemitic.

Henry Payne (Andrews McMeel, 3/17/25) made reference to the Trump administration’s deportation proceedings against student protester Mahmoud Khalil. He drew a despondent Adolf Hitler poring over a military map, lamenting battlefield reverses. He takes consolation in that “Columbia U. has offered [him] a student visa.”

Kirk Walters (King Features Syndicate, 5/29/25) drew a college president side-by-side with George Wallace. As the segregationist yells out, “Segregation now…Segregation tomorrow… Segregation forever!!” the college president yells out, “Antisemitism now… Antisemitism tomorrow… Antisemitism forever!!” The cartoon is a reference to colleges who have been accused by the Trump administration of not doing enough to crack down on pro-Palestinian protests (Politico, 4/6/25).

‘Generated threats of personal violence’

A Mr. Fish cartoon (Scheer Post, 12/1/23) was called antisemitic because it depicted Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu—who has overseen the killing of more than 57,000 people in Gaza—as a butcher covered in blood and holding a knife.

Within two weeks of the Free Beacon article, the University of Pennsylvania chapter of the American Association of University Professors felt compelled to release a statement on the targeted harassment of Fish. The AAUP stated that the article “generated threats of personal violence against him and calls for the university to discipline him,” and that by publishing the date and time of his next class, the Free Beacon “endangered the physical safety of both [Fish] and his students.” The AAUP also criticized the interim president of the university for publicly calling Fish’s cartoons “reprehensible” and saying that Fish should not have published them.

Fish himself has long opposed censorship, writing in the Comics Journal (Summer–Fall/20), “I don’t believe there are images that are so problematic and so hurtful they should be censored, for the same reasons why I don’t believe in censoring the written word.”

After Fish announced his firing, the Free Beacon (3/22/25) could barely contain its glee. It included a quote from the AAUP crediting the publication with launching a campaign of “targeted harassment” against Fish.

It’s clear that right-wing media and pro-Israel pressure groups still have the capacity to threaten the employment of cartoonists who do not toe the pro-Israel line. There is no such organized push-back against anti-Palestinian cartoonists, even though they are targeting the victims of an ongoing genocide.

Featured image: This Mr. Fish cartoon (Scheer Post, 12/31/23) was called antisemitic because it imagined that victims of Nazi genocide were opposed to Israeli genocide.

 

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.

https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin250627Johnson.mp3

 

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.

Metaphor for liberation

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.

‘Bringing terror to the streets of America’

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.

Brutal suppression of protest

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

 

https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin250704.mp3

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

 

(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.

https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin250704CohenSolomon.mp3

 

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

https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin250704Banter.mp3

 

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).

‘Brilliant military operation’

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.”

Upside-down world

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.

‘A grave nuclear threat’

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.

Consistently critical

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.

‘Real change comes from outside the consensus’

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.

Methodology

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.

Focus on Beltway insiders

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.

Skewing (more) male

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.

Overwhelmingly white

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.

Democrats’ shift on Trump

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%.

A different kind of nonpartisan

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