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One hundred years ago this month, I was reminded by Portside’s “This Week in People’s History” feature (5/29/23), a constitutional amendment passed both houses of Congress, with large majorities, and went to the states for ratification. It remains a proposal, not a law, to this day, because the necessary three-quarters of states didn’t accept it.

The proposal is the Child Labor Amendment, giving Congress authority to regulate “labor of persons under 18 years of age.”

Efforts to protect children from dangerous work continued anyway, of course, and the 1938 Fair Labor Standards Act included prohibitions on children under 14 working in most occupations. Separate rules have been crafted for agricultural jobs (which is its own story).

Notre Dame professor David Campbell (Washington Post, 4/23/23):  Because “a bill [that] will allow kids to work more or under dangerous conditions…sounds wildly unpopular…you have to make the case that, no, this is really about parental rights.”

In the last four years, state legislatures in at least 28 states have taken up proposals to roll back child labor protections; 12 states have passed such laws.

In April 2023, the Washington Post (4/23/23) reported on the Foundation for Government Accountability, a Florida-based think tank with a lobbying arm, the Opportunity Solutions Project, that’s crucially behind these state-level moves to undermine rules to keep children from working long hours in dangerous conditions. The Iowa state senate had just approved an FGA-maneuvered bill letting children as young as 14 work night shifts.

Post reporters Jacob Bogage and María Luisa Paúl explained how the group has worked systematically, if stealthily, to push state policy to the right on things like restricting access to anti-poverty programs and Medicaid expansion.

Despite what is, on examination, a broad deregulatory agenda, the FGA, with some 115 lobbyists in 22 states, presents child worker bills as part of a cultural debate about “parental rights.” They aim to remove “the permission slip that inserts government in between parents and their teenager’s desire to work,” a representative said. One bill, in Georgia, would prohibit the state government from requiring a minor to obtain a work permit.

Besides a warning to legislators, such a report ought to have been a call to reporters: Beware of “grassroots” efforts that suspiciously mimic the goals and language of this right-wing interest group, with its undeclared intent to use popular concerns to advance private ends.

Steve Benen (MSNBC, 4/19/24): “Republican governance, especially at the state level, is increasingly invested in rolling back child-labor safeguards.”

Over a year later, child labor rules are still in the news: Early June saw a Labor Department lawsuit against Hyundai after a 13-year-old girl was found working a 50- to 60-hour week on an Alabama assembly line (CBS, 5/31/24). It “shocks the conscience,” said one official.

Before that, we had the Louisiana House voting to repeal the law requiring employers to give child workers lunch breaks (MSNBC, 4/19/24). Many of my child employees want to work without lunch breaks, claimed bill sponsor and Republican state representative and smoothie franchise owner Roger Wilder.

But what about the puppetmasters? A rough Nexis test I did found that over the last three months, a search for the term “child labor” in US newspapers gets 740 results. Add the words “Foundation for Government Accountability” and the number drops to 14.

Does every story on child labor need to mention the advocacy group? Of course not. But if you consider the rollback of child labor laws a problem, connected to other problems, then calling groups like them out adds something key to understanding that problem and how to address it.

Featured image: MSNBC depiction (4/19/24) of a child agricultural worker. An estimated 500,000 minors work in the farm sector in the United States, some as young as 12 years old.

Janine Jackson interviewed Media Matters’ Matt Gertz about Trump’s guilty verdict for the June 7, 2024, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

AP (5/31/24)

Janine Jackson: A Manhattan criminal court found Donald Trump guilty on 34 counts of falsifying business records. This ruling is clearly not the be-all, end-all of a legal redressing of Trump’s myriad crimes; he’s already been found liable in a civil trial for sexual abuse and defamation, and he’s facing another three trials for mishandling classified documents, conspiring to unlawfully change the outcome of the 2020 election, and encouraging the violent January 6, 2021, rampage at the US Capitol.

But commentary from much of the news media—where we learn about what’s happening, what it means, and what we might do about it—is platforming the idea that this might be a disputable issue, that has to do with personal feelings about this particular man. You could joke, “Tell me you’re moving the goalposts without telling me you’re moving the goalposts.” But there are real-world stakes here, and the contortions media are going through to make a convicted felon who boasts of his crimes one side of a reasonable debate is telling us something about Trump and his followers, sure, but it’s also telling us something about news media.

Matt Gertz is senior fellow at Media Matters for America; he’s been working on this issue, and he joins us now by phone. Welcome back to CounterSpin, Matt Gertz.

Matt Gertz: Thanks so much for having me.

JJ: There seems to be an overarching conversation here, which is that if a legal process convicts someone you like, it must be a political—meaning partisan—action, only aimed at silencing a political opponent. I’m not sure that everyone advancing that idea right now is thinking, really, about the implications, that if you decide the law is just whatever you do or don’t like…. Is murder a crime? What if you like the person who did it, you know?

I want to talk through the specifics and the examples that Media Matters has been putting out, because concrete examples show us that we’re not just giving sweeping characterizations. But I just wanted to ask you, first, for your general response to the effort from some media to say that these crimes aren’t really crimes, it’s really just a political hit job. Are you surprised at all by that response?

Matt Gertz: “A good practice for the press would be to explain to their readers and to their viewers that what is coming from the right is totally false, that they are creating these conspiracy theories and this theory of politicized persecution for their own benefit.”

MG: Not really. I think that what we’ve seen over the last nine years, since Trump’s rise began, is that the mainstream press has a big problem coming out and being forthright about Donald Trump’s actions in cases where the right has rallied around him.

And at this point, what we see when we monitor the right-wing media, when we look at what Republicans are saying, is that they are four-square behind him. They are not only denying that he committed the crimes that he was convicted of; they are saying that he is the real victim here, that this is a politicized prosecution, and that now the only recourse is for Republicans to start throwing their own political opponents in jail.

Given the volume and the inflammatory nature of these claims that are coming from the right, I think a good practice for the press would be to explain to their readers and to their viewers that what is coming from the right is totally false, that they are creating these conspiracy theories and this theory of politicized persecution for their own benefit. But instead, what we tend to see is a lot of he-said, she-said coverage, in which there is a certain amount of credence being given to these claims, and that just lets them infest the public discourse in a way that is both unhelpful and, I think, in the longer term dangerous.

JJ: Let’s talk about a couple of the particular counter-narratives that we’re seeing now from right-wing media, to address them. One of them is that the charges against Trump are unprecedented, “nothing like this has ever happened before”; that’s one of the popular ideas, along with the idea that the jury and the judge are somehow tainted in some way. What are you seeing there?

MG: What’s unprecedented, obviously, is that a former president has been repeatedly charged with and, in this case, convicted of crimes. It’s also unprecedented for so many of a former president’s closest associates to be charged with and convicted of crimes, but that is also the case here.

What the right has needed to do, to deal with the fact that often Republican prosecutors and Republican investigators are finding all of this Republican criminality, is they’ve created this vast conspiracy theory, this idea of a “deep-state” plot to get to Donald Trump and everyone associated with him. The reality is much simpler: There are a lot of criminals around Donald Trump because he is an incredibly shady person.

And so what we’ve seen is a full-throttle, round-the-clock effort to try to undermine and delegitimize every aspect of, not only this prosecution, but the two federal probes and the one in Georgia that you alluded to earlier. In this case, that involves attacking not only the New York jury, not only the New York prosecutor, but also the judge, and really every aspect of this case. They leave no stone unturned in their efforts to defend Donald Trump.

CNN (4/7/24)

JJ: I can’t think of a time where someone would say, “Let me tell you what the child of the judge does, and therefore….” It just feels like untested waters that, I guess, I just wish journalists would step up to do more.

MG: I think that’s absolutely right. We really are in uncharted territory; when you see attacks coming in on particular jurors, which we saw early in the trial, and then the excuse-making after the fact that because the trial was in New York City, there was no way Donald Trump could get a fair trial. I mean, you’re really in pretty dangerous territory there.

I will note, by the way, that the claims that Donald Trump could not get a fair trial in New York City came almost immediately after the very same people were bragging about how many people were coming to Donald Trump’s rally in New York, and how he was going to make a real play at winning the state in the 2024 presidential election. You kind of have to pick a lane on that one, but I guess they feel like they can get away with it, because no one will call them on it.

JJ: And hypocrisy is apparently no longer a thing.

I just want to give you a chance to name some names. There are some particular actors and particular outlets that are in this business, and I know that Media Matters does work, not just doing broad, sweeping things, but actually giving examples of particular people, and I think that’s the value. You know, we’re not saying, “The right wing does this.” We’re saying, there are particular instances, and are there any that stand out for you?

New York Times (6/5/24)

MG: Sure. One of them, obviously, I would say Steve Bannon—who is the long-time Trump advisor, and host of the War Room podcast—he spent the days since the verdict making the case for the need for widespread prosecutions of Democrats as a matter of retaliation.

You also see it running the gamut on Fox News, but in particular people like Sean Hannity, Laura Ingraham, are very invested in defending Trump on his conviction specifically.

And then you think about someone like Ben Shapiro—the Daily Wire co-founder—who was famously opposed to Donald Trump when he first ran for president back in 2016, but now, due to the incentives of the right-wing press, he’s come around, and said that the charges against Trump were spurious, and entirely made up so that the media and Joe Biden could claim that he’s a convicted felon, that this is all in evidence of incipient tyranny.

Really just a wild level of rhetoric going on through every aspect of the right, as they try to get around the fact that they’re supporting someone who has been convicted of felony charges.

JJ: Just to pivot for a second, and acknowledge the painful hilarity of the idea, and we kind of talked about it, but the idea that an appeal by Trump would be passed to the New York state’s appellate division, a branch of the New York Supreme Court—and “oh my God, they’re all Black women; obviously he won’t get a fair shake.”

Which, first of all, you’re telling on yourself with that, right? Like, obviously Black people and women would hate him because, you know, he’s just like Jesus Christ, who was famously hated by Black people and women.

But also, like so much that we’re seeing on our screens, it’s just not accurate. The women of color on the meme that people are looking at are five of 21 judges who could be selected to sit for the case. In other words, and maybe we’ve said it, but going bold on disinformation is part of the landscape now.

CNN (5/14/24)

MG: Absolutely, and because of the bifurcation of the news landscape, because you have Republicans bubbled off within their own media sphere, the contrary information doesn’t enter the bubble. They don’t get exposed to the facts or the contradictions that are inherent in what’s going on.

There’s been this big push that I mentioned to declare the Justice Department somehow politicized by Joe Biden, and that is happening at the same time when Joe Biden’s own son is on trial in a federal court for gun crimes. This is an investigation that was launched during the Trump administration, under a Republican attorney general and a Republican FBI director, and is currently carried out by a Trump appointee who Joe Biden kept on.

There’s just not a similar groundswell of people on the left or in the mainstream press who are desperately trying to defend every aspect of Hunter Biden’s life, and try to invalidate the entire judicial system for political gain, the way you see happening literally simultaneously regarding the Trump conviction.

JJ: My complaint about corporate news media right now is that I feel like they are just narrating the nightmare, and they don’t acknowledge how insufficient that is right now, in a society with democratic aspirations, as I say, that relies on public information to make choices. And it’s not about how I feel about a political person, it’s what I’m looking for from a press, and I just wonder, what do you think—you don’t need to name names, but what do you think responsible journalism would look like right now? We’ve said it’s contested waters, it’s difficult. It is a hard time, but what would be the role for independent, responsible journalism right now?

AP (8/29/23)

MG: I think it would be keeping the focus as much as possible on the stakes over the next several months. We are looking at an election where we have, on the one hand, a fairly normal set of politicians, and on the other hand, you have people calling for radical and dangerous changes at every turn. And I think giving people the full explanation, the implication of Trump’s worldview and the policy changes likely to happen if he becomes president, and has, as we might expect, much more leeway within his own party than he had during his last term, is crucial. I don’t think the American public is getting that sort of information about what the election might mean for themselves, and for the future of the country.

JJ: We’re not talking about Trump versus Biden. We’re talking about what journalists could do to lay clear what the information is, what’s at stake, what Trump has said he will do. You don’t have to be politically partisan to ask more of reporters.

MG: That’s absolutely right.

JJ: We’ve been speaking with Matt Gertz; he’s a senior fellow at Media Matters for America. They’re online at www.MediaMatters.org. Matt Gertz, thank you so much for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

MG: Thank you for having me.

Rolling Stone (6/10/24)

This week on CounterSpin: Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito wrote dozens of pages justifying his decision in Dobbs v. Jackson, stating the Constitution does not confer the right to determine whether or when to give birth. None of those pages mention his intention to make the United States “a place of godliness,” or his belief that there can be no compromise on such concerns, because “one side or the other is going to win.” Yet those are thoughts Alito freely expressed with a woman he thought was just a stranger at a public event. So: Will elite news media now suggest we just go back to considering the Supreme Court a neutral body, deserving of life terms because they’re above the fray of politics? How long until we see news media take on this pretend naivete, and how much it’s costing us? Jim Naureckas is editor of FAIR.org and the newsletter Extra!. We talk to him about that.

Institute for Local Self-Reliance (2/28/24)

Also on the show: The news that “the economy” is doing great on paper doesn’t square with the tone-deaf messaging from food companies about mysteriously stubborn high prices: Kellogg’s says, sure, cereal’s weirdly expensive, so why not eat it for dinner! Chipotle’s head honcho says you are not, in fact, getting a smaller portion for the same price—but, you know, if you are, just nod your head a certain way. None of this indicates a media universe that takes seriously the widespread struggle to meet basic needs. Which may explain the failure to find the story in the upsurge in dollar stores, supposedly filling a void for low-income people, but actually just another avenue for ripping them off. We talk about that with Kennedy Smith from the Institute for Local Self-Reliance.

Nicholas Kristof is that guy at the party who reminds you that you haven’t really lived. While you maintain a regular, nine-to-five existence, driving from Point A to Point B, the world has been Kristof’s oyster. With a fully stamped passport, the New York Times columnist can embarrass everyone with his tales from Africa and Asia, marking himself as a true global citizen who yearns for adventure.

Worse, he mobilizes exotic datelines as trump cards to back up his neoliberalism disguised as forward-thinking progressivism: Teachers unions are bad for kids (9/12/12), sweatshops are good for workers (1/14/09) and US imperialism can be a positive force (2/1/02). You, the provincial rube, simply can’t rebut him. “Oh, have you been to Cambodia? No? Well I have.”

Here at FAIR (11/4/21), we were relieved when he announced his resignation from the Times to run for governor of Oregon, taking his vacuous moralism and smug place-dropping to the campaign trail. Upon his disqualification from the election (OPB, 2/18/22), he returned to his coveted perch like he never left at all.

Nicholas Kristof (New York Times, 6/8/24) makes the liberal case for immigration restriction: “It’s better that the ladder be raised in an orderly way by reasonable people.”

Recently, he has jumped in (6/8/24) to defend President Joe Biden’s reactionary move to shut down the border and end asylum on a rolling basis.

The Biden order “would bar migrants from being granted asylum when US officials deem that the southern border is overwhelmed” (AP, 6/5/24), a move many immigration advocates have branded as a capitulation to the xenophobic right (Reason, 6/4/24; Al Jazeera, 6/6/24) in his tough reelection campaign against former President Donald Trump (CBS, 6/9/24).

Conservative media weren’t buying it, however. The Wall Street Journal editorial board (6/4/24) said that the move “might help reduce the flow somewhat if they are strictly enforced, and at least he’s admitting the problem,” but worried that migrants “could still seek asylum at ports of entry using the CBP One mobile app, which would be excluded from the daily triggers.” The National Review (6/5/24) called it “too little, too late” for conservatives. The New York Post editorial board (6/9/24) said the president’s “BS border move has already failed.”

Kristof’s column, by contrast, serves as liberal media support for a policy that is cruel, hypocritical and a further indication that Biden’s only election tactic is to outflank Trump from the right. It is important to see how Kristof, and the Times, wield cosmopolitan journalistic instincts to defend closed borders, xenophobia and outright misinformation that serves the right.

Kristof saying that the US has “lax immigration policies” with a “loophole that allowed people to stay indefinitely” is a cruel misrepresentation of Biden’s border policy (LA Times, 2/24/23).

To start off, Kristof said the current code is flawed because of “a loophole that allowed people to claim asylum and stay indefinitely whether or not they warranted it.” This is a talking point made by anti-immigrant and right-wing groups, and claiming that this is a “loophole” implies that there is a flaw in the system that allows criminals to wiggle out of the law.

In fact, it is legal to come to the country to seek asylum. And the system is far less rosy for refugees than anti-immigrant activists—and now Kristof—portray it. Asylum-seeking families are often separated (LA Times, 2/24/23). And while seeking asylum is a guaranteed right under US and international law, the federal government has “severely restricted access to asylum at the border since 2016” according to the International Rescue Committee (7/1/22). The group explained:

A policy called the Migrant Protection Protocols (MPP) or “Remain in Mexico” forced certain asylum seekers to wait out their US immigration court cases in Mexico with little or no access to legal counsel. Although a federal court blocked the Biden administration’s attempts to end this program, the Supreme Court later ruled in the administration’s favor. For over three years, MPP impacted more than 75,000 asylum seekers, requiring them to wait out their US court hearings in Mexico—mostly in northern border towns. There they faced the often impossible expectations to gather evidence and prepare for a trial conducted in English while struggling to keep their families safe.

Kristof acknowledged that he, as a white man, is an American because his Eastern European father was allowed into the country as a refugee in 1952. But he went on to say that the US today can’t “swing the doors open,” because “we’re not going to welcome all 114 million people around the world who have been forcibly displaced”—as if that’s the question the US faces, rather than the hundreds of thousands of people who actually seek asylum in the US each year. (Of course, Washington could help reduce the global refugee crisis by ending support for the wars, insurgencies and sanctions that to a great extent drive it.)

Wharton School professor Zeke Hernandez (Marketplace, 12/12/23): “When immigrants arrive, there are not just more workers that are competing with native workers, but there are more people who demand housing, entertainment, food, education. And so you need to hire more people to satisfy that bigger demand.”

Admitting that immigration has positive economic impact for the United States, Kristof went for the old line that these newcomers threaten US workers, and that “poor Americans can find themselves hurt by immigrant competition that puts downward pressure on their wages.” Exhibit A is an unnamed neighbor who was forced out of good working-class employment over the decades: “He was hurt by many factors—the decline of unions, globalization and the impact of technology,” Kristof said, but added that “he was also outcompeted by immigrants with a well-earned reputation for hard work.”

First, it is employers, not workers, who have the power to drive down wages. If there is a problem with immigrants being paid less, that’s an issue of exploitation. If Kristof thought about this a little bit longer, he’d realize he’s making an argument for equality among workers, not for dividing them against each other.

But this assumption that immigration depresses wages is itself dubious. The National Bureau of Economic Research (4/24) said:

We calculate that immigration, thanks to native/immigrant complementarity and college skill content of immigrants, had a positive and significant effect between +1.7 to +2.6% on wages of less-educated native workers, over the period 2000–2019, and no significant wage effect on college-educated natives. We also calculate a positive employment rate effect for most native workers.

Zeke Hernandez, professor at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, produced similar findings, noting that immigration causes the economies around these newcomer communities to grow (Marketplace, 12/12/23). And the libertarian Cato Institute (7/26/16) showed that unemployment is lower when immigration is higher.

Axios (3/13/24): “The immigration increase is a key part of the labor supply surge that helped bring down price pressures last year even amid the economy’s robust growth.”

Kristof also ignored that the current unemployment rate (Bureau of Labor Statistics, 6/7/24) is low at 4% and that, with high demand for labor, inflation-adjusted wages have risen 4.1% over the past year (AP, 6/7/24). Axios (3/13/24) reported that a

surge in immigration last year helps explain the economy’s striking resilience—and if sustained, could allow the job market to keep booming without stoking inflation in the years ahead.

Given that the corporate media have been constantly saying the country is facing a “border crisis,” these facts are hard to square with the notion that immigrants depress native-born workers’ wages.

Kristof went on to say that “native-born Americans may not be willing to toil in the fields or on a construction site for $12 an hour, but perhaps would be for $25 an hour.” Once again, if he really felt this way, then he’d be advocating for general wage hikes—for example, raising the federal minimum wage, which hasn’t gone up since 2009—as labor advocates demand, instead of calling for closed borders. But Kristof isn’t on the Times opinion page to advance labor’s interests.

And that’s when Kristof invokes a sort of liberal MAGAism, saying that while American workers are “self-medicating and dying from drugs, alcohol and suicide, shouldn’t we be careful about inflicting even more pain on them through immigration policy?” Immigrants—living, breathing people—are associated with non-living toxins, evoking the Trumpian smear that immigrants are disease-carrying vermin (Guardian, 12/16/23).

Victoria Sanford (BillMoyers.com, 11/17/17): “Then as now, the US is the engine generating migration through bad foreign policy decisions.”

And it still gets worse. Kristof said:

I’ve also wondered about the incentives we inadvertently create. In Guatemalan villages, I’ve seen families prepared to send children on the perilous journey to the United States, and I fear that lax immigration policies encourage people to risk their lives and their children’s lives on the journey.

I have not been to all the places Kristof has, but I’ve been to a few of them, including Guatemala. People leave these places for the US, not because it is so easy, but in spite of the fact that it is so difficult. They come because they are left with no choice but to leave violence, war and poverty behind.

When a man in Lebanon asked that I take him back with me to the US, he was jokingly invoking the reality that the immigration process is impossible without help. Nor did he think there were so many “incentives” beyond the fact that America’s promise of opportunity was an improvement over his broken country.

And it is curious that Kristof mentions Guatemala specifically. Had he read his own newspaper before writing this piece, he might have seen anthropologist Victoria Sanford (New York Times, 11/9/18; BillMoyers.com, 11/17/17) argue that Central Americans are fleeing the horrific crime that has manifested as a result of Washington’s Cold War interventions and current policies of militarism. Latin American studies professor Elizabeth Oglesby (Vice, 6/28/18) made a similar connection . That’s quite a bit of context to leave out.

Arun Gupta (Santita Jackson Show, 6/6/24): ““Biden is feeding into this white nationalism and saying that the solution is this Fortress America.”

I was recently on the Santita Jackson Show (KTNF, 6/6/24) to discuss the recent presidential election in Mexico (FAIR.org, 6/4/24). Joining us was independent journalist Arun Gupta, who has reported from the US/Mexico border for the Nation (4/21/20). He said that the violence of these lawless zones at the border, with migrants waiting to come into the US, will only become more chaotic and dangerous with this new policy.

“Biden is feeding into this white nationalism and saying that the solution is this Fortress America to protect us from these savage brown hordes,” Gupta said. Tens of thousands of migrants have been killed trying to get into the US, he added, and these refugee camps filling up along the border, where narco crime and corrupt police will take more control, will “become death camps.”

Kristof has spent his career telling American readers to care about wars and humanitarian crises abroad (New York Times, 2/6/10, 3/9/11, 6/16/14, 9/4/15, 5/15/24). Yet here he is, utterly indifferent to creating a humanitarian catastrophe right at his own country’s door, seemingly in order to run positive spin for an incumbent president who is eager to rise a few points in the polls.

In fact, Kristof ends with almost a parody of liberalism:

Are we, the people of an immigrant nation, pulling up the ladder after we have boarded? Yes, to some degree. But the reality is that we can’t absorb everyone who wants in, and it’s better that the ladder be raised in an orderly way by reasonable people.

In other words, when a Trumpian policy is practiced by a Democratic administration, it is somehow less horrendous. And Kristof fully admits, “as the son of a refugee,” he is selfishly cutting off people much like his father—except from the Global South, not from Eastern Europe.

And this sums up a very central problem with Kristof. For someone who uses globetrotting as his journalistic trademark, he advances a racist idea that the ability to travel and relocate are reserved for people like him—men of the Global North intellectual class and not the wretched of the earth beneath him.

ACTION ALERT: You can send a message to the New York Times at letters@nytimes.com. Please remember that respectful communication is the most effective. Feel free to leave a copy of your communication in the comments thread.

Venezuelans will head to the polls on July 28 to choose their president for the 2025–30 term. Incumbent President Nicolás Maduro faces nine challengers as he runs for a third term.

Over the past 25 years of US-sponsored coups and economic sanctions, Western corporate media have always proven a reliable source of regime-change propaganda to back Washington’s policies (FAIR.org, 12/17/18, 1/25/19, 8/15/19, 4/15/20, 5/11/20, 1/11/23). Coverage builds to a frenzy around elections, whether driven by a (misguided) hope that US surrogates will win, or by a desire to delegitimize anticipated Chavista victories.

With two months to go, Western outlets are busy crafting familiar narratives, and leading the charge is the New York Times. Not busy enough with its genocide-endorsing coverage of Gaza, the paper of record was keen to back yet another key US foreign policy interest. In a flurry of recent articles, the Times laid down plenty of bias, distortions and outright lies.

The New York Times (5/6/24) sometimes seemed to think Venezuela’s president was named “Authoritarian.”

In less than one week, the New York Times published three articles about the upcoming Venezuelan election, all of which referred to Maduro as “authoritarian” in the headline, rather than by name, so readers immediately take note of the “bad guy”:

• “Meet the Candidate Challenging Venezuela’s Authoritarian President” (5/6/24)
• “Reality Show Contestants Compete for an Authoritarian’s Campaign Jingle” (5/9/24)
• “Can Elections Force Venezuela’s Authoritarian Leader From Power?” (5/11/24)

The Times’ Julie Turkewitz opened the third piece by claiming that Venezuelans are voting “for the first time in more than a decade…in a presidential election with an opposition candidate who has a fighting—if slim and improbable—chance at winning.”

This framing reinforces the common trope that Maduro’s May 2018 victory was “a sham” (New York Times, 5/11/24; Reuters, 5/17/24), “rigged” (New York Times, 5/6/24), “neither free nor fair” (BBC, 3/6/24) or “widely considered fraudulent” (France24, 3/12/24).

Most outlets have never bothered to back up the claims, but Turkewitz argued it was due to the opposition’s “most popular figures” being barred from running. What she did not mention was that the highest-profile of these figures, far-right politician Leopoldo López, had been convicted of trying to violently overthrow the elected government (Venezuelanalysis, 6/13/17, 2/16/15). The other candidate the Times was presumably referring to, Henrique Capriles—who lost elections in 2012 and 2013—was banned for administrative malpractice while holding public office (Venezuelanalysis, 4/11/17).

The hardline opposition, in coordination with Washington, was wedded to election boycotts and insurrection efforts. The Trump administration reportedly went so far as to threaten to sanction opposition frontrunner Henri Falcón if he did not boycott the election. Juan Guaidó, tapped a few months later to lead a self-proclaimed, US-backed “interim government,” was perfectly free to have run for president in 2018.

The Miami Herald (5/6/24) counts chickens that are far from hatching.

Fast forward six years, and the New York Times (5/11/24, 5/16/24) and other establishment outlets (Miami Herald, 5/6/24; Bloomberg, 5/17/24) seem excited by the hardline opposition’s electoral prospects, telling readers that candidate Edmundo González is leading in the polls, but that the Venezuelan government will not accept the results. In fact, the track record of the past 25 years is that Chavismo has always conceded in the contests it has lost, whereas the opposition and its media backers, when they are defeated at the polls, inevitably cry fraud, to the tune of zero evidence (FAIR.org, 1/27/21, 12/3/21, 11/20/20, 5/23/18).

Pundits are basing their current optimism for their candidate on a historically biased and unreliable polling industry, ignoring polls that predict a similarly lopsided victory for Maduro.

The New York Times (5/11/24) also made reference to the “enormous” turnout in the opposition’s October primaries, suggesting that this presaged a large anti-Maduro vote in the general election. Put aside the fact that the primary figures were shrouded in doubt, and that the organizing commission never released detailed results; the turnout claimed by the opposition was 2.3 million people, in a country with an adult population of 20 million. The governing Socialist Party, by comparison, has 4 million registered members.

Finally, there is also wonderment at the size of opposition rallies (AP, 5/18/24; New York Times, 5/16/24). Not only is crowd measurement a very inexact science, the context is erased by ignoring the constant, massive pro-government mobilizations taking place as well.

It was not Maduro that blocked María Corina Machado from running (Bloomberg, 3/16/24), but Venezuela’s Supreme Court, which upheld her ban on running for office, citing her support for US sanctions, among other disqualifications.

Alongside prematurely cheering an opposition victory, the paper of record has been preparing arguments to dismiss the results should Maduro win. The key one is centered on US favorite María Corina Machado, who is said to be “barred by the government”—or by Maduro himself—from running, a lazily dishonest description common to many corporate outlets (New York Times, 5/11/24, 5/16/24; AP, 5/18/24, 2/28/24; Bloomberg, 3/16/24; Washington Post, 4/17/24).

A far-right zealot and heiress from Venezuela’s elite, Machado has long been a corporate media favorite (New York Times, 11/19/05). She has always been depicted as a champion of democracy despite participating in coup attempts, going on record as endorsing a foreign invasion, and allegedly receiving direct funding from the US.

Machado’s disqualification is the smoking gun used to justify Washington’s reimposition of oil sanctions (more on that below), and to prove that Maduro has not followed through on supposed commitments to hold the “free and fair elections” agreed to with the US-backed opposition in Barbados in October 2023. This is false on two counts.

For starters, many Western sources blatantly lie by stating that the Barbados Agreement allowed Machado to run for president (Washington Post, 4/17/24; New York Times, 4/17/24; Reuters, 4/17/24, 4/12/24; CNN, 1/27/24; BBC, 1/30/24). What the document explicitly says is that anyone could be a candidate, provided that they fulfill the requirements established by Venezuelan law and the constitution to run for office. In Machado’s case, she was already serving a political ban, and there was nothing in the agreement suggesting it would be lifted.

Secondly, the Venezuelan government and opposition delegations from the Barbados accords agreed on a procedure for disqualified candidates to appeal before the Venezuelan Supreme Court (Venezuelanalysis, 12/1/23). Machado—under pressure from the US, it’s suspected—filed her appeal. And an appeal, by definition, can be rejected. The Supreme Court pointed to corrupt actions and the jeopardizing of Venezuelan assets abroad to uphold her exclusion (Venezuelanalysis, 1/27/24).

When the same party controls Congress and the White House in the United States, you won’t find the New York Times (5/11/24) complaining that the president has the legislature, the military and the country’s budget “in his grip.”

Apart from misrepresenting the case of one of Venezuela’s most anti-democratic figures, the New York Times (5/11/24) marshaled other arguments to dismiss a potential Maduro victory in advance:

Ahead of the July 28 vote, Mr. Maduro, 61, has in his grip the legislature, the military, the police, the justice system, the national election council, the country’s budget and much of the media, not to mention violent paramilitary gangs called colectivos.

Leaving aside the demonized colectivos and the misconceptions surrounding Venezuelan media (FAIR.org, 5/20/19), the rest of the list is astounding. The legislature was won by the Socialist Party in the 2020 elections, and has the prerogative to appoint Supreme Court justices and the Electoral Council. Corporate pundits would presumably never write that a US president “has Congress in his grip.”

What is worse is Turkewitz’s dismay at Maduro wielding the constitutional responsibilities belonging to the president. The Venezuelan president is the commander-in-chief of the armed forces, and appoints the interior minister who runs the police. And somehow media stenographers expect Venezuela’s elected leader to share control of the budget with the US’s chosen surrogates.

This Spanish-language AP piece (2/9/24) retracted a misrepresentation that the New York Times (5/11/24) repeated three months later.

But the pinnacle of poor journalism in the May 11 Times piece was the following paragraph:

Mr. Maduro has hardly indicated that he is ready to leave office. He promised a large crowd of followers in February that he would win the election “by hook or by crook.”

It is unclear why the New York Times writer would expect someone campaigning for reelection to “indicate…he is ready to leave office.” However, it is the second sentence that is an absolute fabrication. In said rally, Maduro is clearly talking about defeating US- and opposition-led coup efforts “por las buenas o por las malas”—the Spanish idiom the Times translates as “by hook or by crook.”

In the video linked, uploaded by a Venezuelan journalist precisely to clarify the context of those words, Maduro lists anti-democratic plots going back to 2002, and vows that the country’s “civilian-military” unity will defeat any possible coup attempt “por las buenas o por las malas”—”by any means necessary,” one might say. There is no reference to the upcoming elections at all.

The Associated Press (2/9/24) had months ago misused the Venezuelan president’s words in the same way. After widespread criticism, the news service attached a note to the Spanish-language report: “The Associated Press improperly used a quote from President Nicolás Maduro as if he had said it in connection with the upcoming presidential election.” That didn’t stop the Times from committing the exact same misrepresentation three months later.

Reuters (4/17/24) reported that the Biden administration was reimposing sanctions on Venezuela “in response to President Nicolas Maduro’s failure to meet his election commitments.” But the Barbados Agreement did not commit the government to allow any candidate to run, but only those who met legal and constitutional qualifications—and it asked all parties “to respect and comply with the electoral regulations and the decisions of the National Electoral Council.”

The US is not only pushing opposition candidates in Venezuela; it’s also using economic sanctions to undermine Maduro’s presidency. Following the Barbados agreement in October, the US agreed to allow transactions with the Venezuelan oil sector for six months. But US officials claimed that the Maduro government had not fulfilled its commitments and reimposed its sanctions against Venezuela’s oil industry on April 18. In tandem, corporate media reintroduced its whitewashing and endorsement of deadly coercive measures (FAIR.org, 6/13/22, 6/4/21).

The New York Times and Turkewitz (5/11/24) rolled out some of the main tropes that downplay those sanctions, writing that “Maduro blames sanctions” for the country’s economic troubles. This formulation places the idea that sanctions hurt the Venezuelan economy in the mouth of the demonized Maduro, when even US officials are on the record saying that sanctions are meant to cause economic pain.

The Times went on to say that “the government has been choked” by US sanctions. The implication is that only Venezuela’s leaders are affected by sanctions. But as the Center for Economic and Policy Research (4/25/19) has demonstrated, they are a “collective punishment” that has caused tens of thousands of deaths per year. Yet Turkewitz failed to explain their economic impact on Venezuelans, who widely condemn them—as does most of the international community.

One coordinated mistruth spread by the Times (4/17/24, 5/16/24) and others (e.g., Reuters, 4/17/24, 5/11/24; BBC, 1/30/24) is that crushing US sanctions against Venezuela only began in 2019. In fact, the Trump administration levied financial sanctions against the oil industry in mid-2017 that sent output plummeting. The goal of that media obfuscation is far from subtle: absolve Washington of responsibility for Venezuela’s economic troubles, especially the fall in oil production.

Turkewitz’s article matter-of-factly stated that a Maduro victory on July 28 will “intensify poverty” in Venezuela. Turkewitz is either taking for granted that US economic aggression will continue—without explaining that to readers—or is convinced that Washington’s adversaries are predestined by nature or fate to ruin their economies. Venezuela is in fact set for a fourth straight year of economic growth, despite the multi-billion dollar impact of US sanctions. The only thing that seems to always intensify is the New York Times’ imperialist propaganda.

The biggest outside spender in the 2022 Democratic primaries was an unlikely group: the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. This year, AIPAC—a group backed by Republican mega-donors that is devoted to maintaining strong US support for the far-right government of Israel—is going even bigger, aiming to spend a cool $100 million via its super PAC, the United Democracy Project.

If the Koch brothers quietly spent millions to sway Democratic primaries, their chosen candidates would be tarred. Same goes for Big Oil, the NRA and other right-wing special interests. But AIPAC is an exception to this rule.

“AIPAC [is] the biggest source of Republican money flowing into competitive Democratic primaries this year,” Politico (6/9/24) reported. AIPAC’s UDP is “by far the biggest outside group in Democratic primaries, with more money flowing from UDP than the next 10 biggest spenders combined.”

Despite being conservative donors’ preferred instrument for hijacking Democratic primaries, UDP is described in media reports as “pro-Israel,” often with little said of its right-wing funding. This glaring omission provides AIPAC with cover to play in Democratic primaries in ways other right-wing groups can’t.

The Washington Post (5/14/24) waited until the 21st of 28 paragraphs to mention that Elfreth (right) had gotten $4.1 million in support from an AIPAC-affiliated super PAC—almost as much as rival Harry Dunn raised altogether.

I recently watched this play out in a nearby congressional district. On May 14, many Democratic primary voters went to the polls without knowing that a leading candidate for Maryland’s safely blue 3rd Congressional District, state Sen. Sarah Elfreth, was backed by right-wing billionaires via AIPAC’s super PAC.

Voters were kept in the dark thanks to deficient reporting. A Washington Post (5/14/24) story on election day, for example, waited until the 21st paragraph to mention that UDP had spent over $4 million on the race; then the Post quickly added: “United Democracy Project says it takes money from Republicans and Democrats.”

That last statement is technically true, and also deceiving.

While UDP’s funders hail from both parties, they share an elite status: Nearly 60% of them are CEOs and corporate honchos, In These Times (6/3/24) found. “But in no world could you even call this a bipartisan group of benefactors. It’s Republicans who know what they’re doing,” wrote Slate’s Alexander Sammon (2/7/24), in a story headlined, “There Sure Are a Lot of Republican Billionaires Funding the Democratic Primaries.” Sammon found that only one of the top ten donors to UDP “can even plausibly be called a regular Democratic booster.”

Among those Republican billionaires, as researched by the muckraking news outlet Sludge (3/4/24): Home Depot co-founder Bernie Marcus, who’s given UDP $3 million and donated around $65 million to Republican groups over the past decade, including $17 million to Trump super PACs; hedge fund manager Paul Singer, who’s given UDP $2 million and contributed millions more to Republican causes (and lavished gifts on Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito); and WhatsApp founder Jan Koum, UDP’s top funder at $5 million this cycle, who’s bankrolled groups that support Israel’s illegal settlements.

Despite its heavy Republican funding, UDP spends almost exclusively in Democratic primaries. (UDP’s parent organization, AIPAC, has a less exclusive focus and backs many Republicans— including over 100 congressmembers who voted to overturn the 2020 election—through a separate political action committee.)

In the May 14 story, however, the Post never used its own authoritative voice to convey the above facts to readers—many of whom, as Democratic primary voters, would be alarmed to learn that right-wing donors were quietly backing a Democratic candidate. By playing dumb to Sarah Elfreth’s conservative support, the Post slyly helped her win.

The Washington Post (5/14/24) made Elfreth’s acceptance of “dark money” an accusation leveled by her opponent Harry Dunn (right)—and quoted another source saying Dunn complaining about it was “exactly what is broken with Washington.”

Of course, newspapers are supposed to be evenhanded, so the Post gave Elfreth’s opponent space to call out AIPAC’s millions—but even here, the coverage was slanted.

UDP’s massive spending “prompted the Dunn campaign to accuse Elfreth of taking ‘dark money’ and lumping her in with far-right Republicans,” the Post reported.

By having Harry Dunn—and not the Post itself—call out Elfreth’s Republican support, the Post turned an explosive issue into a mere allegation from a political opponent.

Then the Post went further, seeking to invalidate not only Dunn’s statement, but the candidate himself. (Dunn is a former Capitol Police officer who won national acclaim for fighting off January 6 insurrectionists.)

The Post wrote:

The Dunn campaign’s efforts to link Elfreth—an established Democrat—to Trump supporters rubbed some Maryland politicians the wrong way. “It just is exactly what is broken with Washington and not what will lead to a more productive US Congress,” said Maryland Senate President Bill Ferguson…[who] said the insinuation reflected Dunn’s inexperience in politics.”

The Post story, while troubling, wasn’t exceptional. If anything, the Baltimore Banner’s coverage was worse.

The Baltimore Banner (5/12/24) dismissed criticism of Elfreth’s AIPAC help, saying that “criticizing an opponent’s money is nothing new.”

In the month leading up to the primary, UDP spent over $100,000 a day boosting Elfreth. This prompted other candidates to call out the influx of outside Republican money. But their protests elicited little more than a yawn from the Banner’s Rick Hutzell (5/12/24). “Criticizing an opponent’s money is nothing new,” he wrote.

Hutzell then took to lecturing Elfreth’s opponents, although not with much accuracy. “It’s not dark money,” he insisted. “UDP discloses its donors.”

At least Hutzell got the second part right.

“UDP is legally obligated to disclose its direct donors,” wrote HuffPost’s Daniel Marans (4/3/24), “but it may receive donations from corporations and nonprofits whose funders are not public.”

In other words, a donor who wished to provide Elfreth with anonymous support could’ve done so by having a non-disclosing entity, like AIPAC, forward their donation to UDP.

“If these MAGA donors funneled their money through AIPAC or any other nonprofit, then the individual donors would not be identified,” Craig Holman, a campaign finance expert with Public Citizen, told FAIR. “This is dark money in the truest sense of the word.”

The Guardian (5/14/22) suggested that AIPAC’s intervention in Maryland’s 3rd district House race might have been motivated to block labor lawyer John Morse, a minor candidate who made Gaza a central issue of his campaign—though the third-place candidate, state Sen. Clarence Lam, was also more critical of Israel than AIPAC would have been comfortable with.

Why AIPAC was involved in this race in the first place was a bit of a mystery, as the two leading candidates, Elfreth and Dunn, held seemingly indistinguishable views on Israel.

When asked about this, a UDP spokesperson (Guardian, 5/14/22)  said there were “some serious anti-Israel candidates in this race, who are not Harry Dunn, and we need to make sure that they don’t make it to Congress.”

But UDP didn’t specify who was on its naughty list. Meanwhile, the race was already down to a two-way contest by the time UDP unleashed its millions, so all UDP was doing at that point was thwarting Dunn, who’s also pro-Israel.

Even Elfreth was confounded by UDP’s efforts, or so she claimed. Asked why the group was boosting her, Elfreth told the Banner, “I honest to God have no idea.”

No idea? Four months before announcing her candidacy, Elfreth took her first trip to Israel on what sounds like an AIPAC junket. She visited “a kibbutz that was [later] attacked by Hamas on October 7, an Iron Dome battery, a Hezbollah tunnel on the Lebanese border, the West Bank and religious sites,” Jewish Insider (4/3/24) reported.

In endorsing Elfreth, Pro-Israel America PAC, an AIPAC-adjacent group, wrote, “Sarah has traveled to Israel on a life-changing trip that will forever influence her worldviews.” The group quoted Elfreth as saying, “[I] walked away knowing that I believe—after millennia of the world turning its back on the Jewish people—that the State of Israel has the right to exist and to defend itself.”

Whether or not Elfreth was clueless about AIPAC’s support, one thing was clear: She was determined to keep its millions flowing her way. At an April debate with 16 hopefuls on stage, “moderators asked the candidates if they would swear off corporate PAC money,” Maryland Matters (4/18/24) reported. “Only Elfreth stayed seated.”

She was smart to do so, as AIPAC’s millions can prove decisive. They certainly did two years ago in a neighboring congressional district.

Intercept (7/20/22): Donna Edwards’ “past refusal to unconditionally support funding that enables Israel’s ongoing occupation and destruction of Palestinian communities was more than enough to draw the ire of the conservative pro-Israel donors who mobilized to defeat her.”

In 2022, Donna Edwards was poised to reclaim the House seat she’d vacated six years earlier. “Then the ads started pouring in,” the Intercept (7/20/22) reported:

[UDP] spent $6 million on television spots, mailers and other media…. Other pro-Israel organizations pitched in about $1 million more. The result was one of the most expensive congressional primaries in history, with nearly all of the money coming from outside the district over the course of only a few weeks.

Amid the $7 million onslaught, Edwards’ lead vanished. She lost the Democratic primary to prosecutor Glenn Ivey, who was quick to thank AIPAC after his win.

I keep thinking back to this election and wondering, what if reporters had called out AIPAC for hijacking this local race? At the very least, it would have made it harder for the group to get away with doing the same thing two years later, on behalf of Elfreth.

AIPAC’s continued ability to steal Democratic primaries rests on a collective amnesia setting in after each election. Unfortunately, reporters have proven willing to do their part to make this happen.

Last month, the moment Elfreth won, what little coverage there was of AIPAC lessened.

Take the May 14 Post story discussed above. While AIPAC appeared in its tenth paragraph, once Elfreth won, the story was rewritten, and AIPAC dropped down to the 21st paragraph.

AP‘s story (5/14/24) on Elfreth’s victory mentioned her “endorsements from the state’s teachers union and environmental groups”—but not AIPAC, which provided almost three-fourths of the money spent on behalf of her campaign.

That was better than an AP story (5/14/24) the Post ran, which didn’t mention AIPAC at all.

A Baltimore Sun (5/15/24) story belatedly noted AIPAC’s role, but only after portraying Elfreth as a victim of big money by comparing her to Angela Alsobrooks, a candidate who was up against the biggest self-funder in Senate primary history, liquor store magnate David Trone. “Not only were Elfreth and Alsobrooks…up against nationally known figures…they both also trailed their opponents in fundraising,” the Sun reported. This is only true if you don’t count the help UDP gave Elfreth; counting that money, which the Sun did later mention, she had a spending advantage of more than $1 million.

But once again, it was the Banner that took the cake. In Hutzell’s post-election story (5/17/24), Elfreth was the victim, having been forced to endure TV ads attacking “her over a pro-Israel super PAC spending millions to support her without her knowledge.”

It’s not until the 35th paragraph that Hutzell bothers to name AIPAC, and only in the context of how Elfreth is going to be, of all things, a champion for campaign finance reform.

She wants to pick up where US Rep. John Sarbanes, the man she hopes to succeed, left off on campaign finance reform. Elfreth makes this last pledge without irony, given the criticism she received for the more than $4.5 million that the American Israel Public Affairs Committee spent on her behalf.

With coverage like this, come 2026, AIPAC will be positioned to continue manipulating Democratic primaries by quietly weaponizing right-wing dollars.

“UDP’s heavy reliance on right-wing (even hard-right) oligarchs comes into stark relief when looking at its most elite donors,” an In These Times analysis (6/3/24) found.

What’s so cynical is that UDP isn’t upfront about why it’s spending millions in Democratic primaries—at least not until after the election is over.

In explaining its support of Elfreth, UDP highlighted domestic issues, listing abortion rights, climate change and domestic violence—issues that are unlikely to matter much if at all to UDP’s Republican donors. The millions of dollars in ads UDP aired for Elfreth didn’t mention Israel; just like the group’s ads against Donna Edwards from two years earlier. “They know that Israel is not a winning issue,” said James Zogby (In These Times, 6/3/24).

But the moment the election was over, AIPAC declared that Elfreth’s win showed that it’s progressive “to stand with the Jewish state as it battles aggression from the Iranian regime and its terrorist proxies.”

In backing Elfreth, AIPAC’s right-wing donors knew exactly what they were doing. And so did Elfreth, notwithstanding her claims of ignorance. Reporters knew the score, too, even if their coverage didn’t reflect that. The only ones kept in the dark were voters.

As the world watched on social media and responded in outrage, US corporate media, once again, provided cover for the perpetrators of Israel’s genocide. 

CounterPunch (5/31/24): “When the Israeli bombs strafed the safe zone, the plastic tents caught fire, sending flames leaping two meters high, before the melting, blazing structures collapsed on the people inside, many of them children who’d just been tucked in for the evening.”

Over the Memorial Day weekend, Israel bombed starving Gazan refugees crowded in tents in Rafah, where Israel had told them to go. As Jeffrey St. Clair (CounterPunch, 5/31/24) wrote, leaflets dropped in Rafah a few days before told them to go to “Tel al-Sultan through Beach Road,” an area set up by the UNRWA refugee agency and designated a UN humanitarian safe zone. The leaflet added, “Don’t blame us after we warned you.”

Nevertheless, without warning, Israel hit the camp with at least eight  missiles  spreading fire though the encampment of plastic tents (Quds News, 5/26/24). Some refugees burned to death, mostly women and children, leaving them dismembered and charred.

The world saw the terror of the massacre on international and social media. Images showed the area of the strike engulfed in flames as Palestinians screamed, cried, ran for safety and sought to help the injured. “They told people to move there then killed them,” Richard Medhurst (5/28/24) posted.

A boy cries in horror and fear as he watches his father’s tent burn with him inside. A man holds up the body of his charred, now-headless baby, wandering around, not knowing what to do or where to go. An injured, starving child convulses in pain as a medic struggles to find a vein for an IV in her emaciated arm (Al Jazeera, 5/27/24).

Al Jazeera (cited by Quds News, 5/26/24) quoted a Civil Defense source: “We believe that the occupation army used internationally prohibited weapons to target the displaced in Rafah, judging by the size of the fires that erupted at the targeted site.”

US news media reported the tent massacre, some more truthfully than others. But most establishment media repeated Israel’s false claims that it was an accident, weaving disinformation messaging into toned-down descriptions of the scene. With confused syntax, they omitted words like “genocide,” “massacre” and “starvation.” Most left out the language of international law that is best able to explain the unprecedented crimes against humanity that Israel is committing. Corporate reporting left the tent massacre devoid of context and empathy, ignored actions that need to be taken, and ultimately facilitated the ongoing Israeli genocide of Palestinians.

By being embedded with Israeli forces, NBC (5/28/24) presented news literally from the IDF point of view.

When NBC News (5/28/24) reported from Gaza that “Israeli tanks reached the city center for the first time, according to NBC News‘ crew on the ground,” it failed to say that the NBC crew was embedded with Israel’s invading force.

The same sentence continued that Israel was “defying international pressure to halt an offensive that has sent nearly 1 million people fleeing Rafah.” But Israel was not just “defying…pressure”; it was in violation of a direct order from the International Court of Justice ICJ to halt its attack on Rafah. Yet NBC reporters rode into Rafah with an army that was ignoring international law to commit further genocide in Gaza.

Compare NBC’s words to those used by Ramy Abdu (5/26/24), chair of Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor, who posted: “In the deadliest response to the International Court of Justice’s decision, the Israeli army targeted a group of displaced persons’ tents in Rafah, killing approximately 60 innocent civilians so far.”

In a post, Francesca Albanese (5/26/24), UN special rapporteur for human rights in Palestine, included International actions that needed to be implemented:

The #GazaGenocide‌ will not easily end without external pressure: Israel must face sanctions, justice, suspension of agreements, trade, partnership and investments, as well as participation in int’l forums.

Such sanctions are rarely discussed in establishment media, but are becoming more urgent, given the New York Times report (5/29/24) that Israel intends to extend the genocide through the remainder of 2024. Though the Times reported on the global outrage and demonstrations against the Rafah massacre, the words “genocide” and “massacre” were not used, nor was there any mention of the possibility of sanctions against Israel.

X (5/27/24)

Instead of sourcing the International Criminal Court, the International Court of Justice or any humanitarian actors in the region, NBC (5/28/24) quoted a UN National Security Council spokesperson:

Israel has a right to go after Hamas, and we understand this strike killed two senior Hamas terrorists who are responsible for attacks against Israeli civilians…. But as we’ve been clear, Israel must take every precaution possible to protect civilians.

Israel’s claim that it killed two Hamas leaders became the rationale for the strike, which was repeated extensively on corporate media. Over NBC‘s images of burning tents and killing scenes, the header read, “Dozens killed in Gaza tent camp in an airstrike targeting two Hamas commanders.”

The dead were connected to Hamas whenever possible. At the bottom of the video, the subtitles listed numbers of dead, followed with, “according to the emergency services in Hamas-run Gaza.”

Human rights attorney and Rutgers academic Noura Erakat (5/27/24) exposed the attempt to link murdered children to Hamas. Over the picture of a burned baby, she posted these harsh words:

Have you ever seen a burnt baby? Can you imagine her final, gaping screams? And all Israel had to tell you was “Hamas,” so you look at her and shrug. Your willful ignorance is genocidal.

CounterPunch (5/31/24) quoted Jeremy Konyndyk, former head of disaster relief for US Agency for International Development, saying, “Bombing a tent camp full of displaced people is a clear-cut, full-on war crime” who added, “Even if Hamas troops were present, that does not absolve the IDF of the obligation to protect civilians. It does not turn a tent camp into a free fire zone.”

Al Jazeera+ media critic Sana Saeed (X, 5/27/24) called the writers of such headlines “propagandists for genocide masquerading as journalists.”

On NBC (5/28/24), under the footage of the burning horrors of Rafah, the chyron read, “Netanyahu: Deadly Strike a Tragic Incident.”

In response to Israel’s “accident” claim, journalists, activists and social media users, including Rep. Rashida Tlaib, reacted with incredulity and withering criticism of those who asserted it. That was the reaction Axios reporter and CNN analyst Barak Ravid (5/27/24) received when he posted, “Breaking: Netanyahu says the airstrike in Rafah on Sunday was ‘a tragic mistake,’ and adds that it will be investigated.” Katie Halper (5/27/24) replied to Ravid with, “Nice to see you using your position as a journalist to do comms for the Israeli government.”

And Tlaib (5/27/24) commented:

This was intentional. You don’t accidentally kill massive amounts of children and their families over and over again and get to say, “It was a mistake.” Genocidal maniac Netanyahu told us he wants to ethnically cleanse Palestinians.

She ended with the question, “When are you going to believe him?”

Sana Saeed (5/27/24), media critic for Al Jazeera+, posted the front pages of four print publications that repeated Netanyahu’s accident claim. The New York Times used “Tragic Accident,” while “Tragic Mistake” was preferred by Time magazine, Forbes and the AP. Over the headlines, she called them “propagandists for genocide masquerading as journalists.”

The second paragraph of CNN‘s report (5/28/24) featured Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s claim: “Despite our best effort not to harm those not involved, unfortunately a tragic error happened last night.”

But CNN (5/28/24) seemed to be vying for Most Valuable Propagandists by elaborating on the unlikely details offered by the IDF to describe the official Israeli version of what happened. It began with Netanyahu speaking to the Knesset: “Despite our best effort not to harm those not involved, unfortunately a tragic error happened last night. We are investigating the case.”

After four paragraphs of details of the massacre—“burned bodies, including those of children, could be seen being pulled by rescuers from the wreckage”—CNN returned to the justifications. The long, breathless chain of details began:

A US official told CNN Monday that Israel had told the Biden administration it used a precision munition to hit a target in Rafah, but that the explosion from the strike ignited a fuel tank nearby and started a fire that engulfed a camp for displaced Palestinians and led to dozens of deaths.

But the claims could not be confirmed; “It’s what Israel shared with us,” the official said.

But the attack on Rafah was in no way a single “precision” “hit,” as numerous sources reported that multiple bombs hit the camp. And Al Jazeera (5/27/24) reported that Israeli drone strikes also hit the Kuwaiti Hospital, the only functioning hospital in the area, killing two medics. It also pointed out that no notice to evacuate came before the strike.

In an X post (5/27/24), Intercept co-founder Jeremy Scahill noted the shifting narrative coming from Israel:

Netanyahu now admits Israel carried out the horrifying bombings that incinerated human beings in Rafah last night and turned a refugee camp into hellfire. I assume all the people who claimed it was actually a failed Hamas rocket attack will now rush to correct themselves.

As we observed after the flour massacre (FAIR.org, 3/22/24), Israel’s string of differing false statements immediately following a massacre is an IDF propaganda strategy designed to confuse and delay. Focusing on changing falsities distracts from the massacre and turns the cameras away from the horrible images of US-supplied weapons slaughter. In this way, massacres become normalized.

Repeating and discussing the ever-changing Israeli disinformation of denial, discussing weapons and official statements, also allows US corporate media to avoid easily observed patterns of Israel’s ongoing massacres, in addition to drawing public attention away from the suffering. But on social media, the raw footage and cries of outrage by users indicate that the manufactured emotional distance collapses online.

Some users expressed extreme distress after prolonged viewing of such imagery. One Palestinian organizer (5/27/24) said:

I’m shaking uncontrollably since last night. I can’t get the beheaded baby that was burned alive. The woman’s screaming out of my head. The decomposed bodies of babies out of my head. The girl whose body was stuck to a wall. Hind’s final message to PRCS…. And now. How do you watch all this and not feel your soul dead?

The daughter of Palestinian refugees posted (5/27/24):

The flour massacre, the tents massacre, the hospital massacre, the refugee camp massacre, the “safe corridor” massacre, the endless massacres, in homes, on the streets, in tents, on foot— eight months of massacre after massacre after massacre.

Another user (5/27/24) asked, “Why do so many Israeli mistakes involve launching multiple missiles at people they’ve assured are in safe zones?”

It was the Israeli newspaper Haaretz (2/29/24) that exposed US corporate media reporting as repeated propaganda in a piece titled, “In Netanyahu’s Israel, the Rafah Horror Was Neither ‘a Mishap’ nor Exceptional.” The editorial scoffed at the use of “tragic mishap” to describe the “horrific incident.” It observed that “it took Netanyahu 20 hours to produce the disgraceful statement, which, as usual, lacked any shred of regret over the death of ‘noncombatants.’”

Haaretz derided the “willful media blackout regarding the scope of death and destruction over the last eight months.” Skeptical about the assertion that “it was not expected to cause damage to noncombatant civilians,” the paper observed that, if true, “this involves an ongoing failure at the strategic level.”

LA Progressive (6/7/24): “In response to this massacre…the best US spokespeople could muster was to urge Israel to be ‘transparent’ about the assault.”

By May 29, US corporate media began to report extensively that the Israeli bombs dropped on Rafah that burned Palestinian refugees alive were made in the US. A  munitions fragment was filmed by Palestinian journalist Alam Sadeq, and was posted on X (5/27/24) by former US Army explosive expert Trevor Ball two days earlier. Much was made of the fact that the ordinance was smaller than the usual 2,000-pound bombs used to destroy Gaza, and were the preferred bombs the Biden administration had sent to Israel.

As the New York Times (5/29/24) put it, “US officials have been pushing Israel to use more of this type of bomb, which they say can reduce civilian casualties.” The lengthy report included a drawing of the bomb, the details of its manufacture, and assertions that its use by Israel indicated they tried to kill fewer civilians. Gone were any mention of the “tragic mistake,” and the “exploded fuel tank,” forgotten as yesterday’s fake news.

But a lengthy back-and-forth about how the fire could have started failed to point out the obvious, which comes only at the very end when a retired US Air Force sergeant observes, “When you use a weapon that’s intended as precision and low–collateral damage in an area where civilians are saturated, it really negates that intended use.”

As Israel’s atrocities continue to mount in Gaza, the LA Progressive (6/7/24) wrote that though Biden claimed to care about the loss of civilian life in Gaza, and that an Israeli attacked on Rafah would be a “red line,” “events of the past weeks have demonstrated that none of these claims are in fact true.” It added that a month ago, Hamas agreed to an Egyptian-brokered ceasefire agreement “that looked a lot like the ceasefire agreement now being promoted by the Biden administration,” but Israel responded by rejecting that agreement as well.

In addition, Israel closed off the border area between Israel and Egypt, cutting off any aid or supplies from coming into famine-ravaged Gaza. The authors concluded, “What has transpired is a horrifying series of massacres against civilians, which the Biden administration continues to try to downplay, excuse and explain away.”

Over the last eight months, US establishment media have helped Biden “explain away” such  atrocities. They have not stopped repeating Israel’s propaganda, and have acted as willing conduits for Israeli disinformation. It is past time they stopped doing so, and started reporting on what is actually happening on the ground in Gaza, not through the eyes of the IDF.

Across corporate media, journalists and pundits introduced conspiracy theories to discredit the pro-Palestine student protest movement, particularly that they are funded by foreign countries or “outside agitators.”

Joe Scarborough and Hillary Clinton on MSNBC‘s Morning Joe (5/9/24) to talk about “misinformation,” agreeing that student protesters are “extremists…funded by Qatar.”

MSNBC‘s Joe Scarborough (5/9/24) went on a rant about the college students who have been staging the protests, suggesting to guest Hillary Clinton that they were influenced by China or Qatar:

I’m going to talk about radicalism on college campuses. The sort of radicalism that has mainstream students getting propaganda, whether it’s from their professors or whether it’s from Communist Chinese government through TikTok, calling the president of the United States “Genocide Joe.” Calling you and President Clinton war criminals.

Eventually, he called the students “extremists—I’m sorry—funded by Qatar.”

Clinton responded: “You raised things that need to be vented about.”

Scarborough’s claim that Qatar funds the students likely comes from a Jerusalem Post article (4/30/24), which called the protests “despicable.” The story reported, “Qatar has invested $5.6 billion in 81 American universities since 2007, including the most prestigious ones: Harvard, Yale, Cornell and Stanford.” Of course, funding  universities is not the same as funding student protests; the university administrations that actually received the Qatari funding have often been quite hostile to the protesters.

Nancy Pelosi, interviewed by Dana Bash on CNN (1/28/24), accused protesters of being “connected to Russia” because “to call for a ceasefire is Mr. Putin’s message.”

House Speaker Emeritus Nancy Pelosi (D–Calif.) suggested on CNN’s State of the Union (1/28/24) that Russia has played a role in the protests:

And what we have to do is try to stop the suffering and gossip….. But for them to call for a ceasefire is Mr. Putin’s message…. I think some of these protesters are spontaneous and organic and sincere. Some I think are connected to Russia.

CNN’s Dana Bash asked, “you think some of these protests are Russian plants?” Pelosi responded: “I don’t think they’re plants; I think some financing should be investigated.”

Like MSNBC, Fox News (5/2/24) has also pushed the narrative suggesting that China is behind the protests: “China may be playing a significant role in the anti-Israel protests by using TikTok to foment division on college campuses,” Alicia Warren wrote.

Gordon Chang, a senior fellow at the far-right, anti-Muslim Gatestone Institute, told Fox that “China is using the curation algorithm of TikTok to instigate protests.”

The presence of pro-Palestinian advocacy on TikTok has been cited by lawmakers as a justification for censoring the social media platform (FAIR.org, 5/8/24). But the messages on TikTok, which is popular among younger people, may simply reflect public opinion among that demographic. According to the Pew Research Center, “Younger adults are much less supportive of the US providing military aid to Israel than are older people.”

In a story headlined, “Campus Protests Give Russia, China and Iran Fuel to Exploit US Divide,” the New York Times (5/2/24) described “overt and covert efforts by the countries to  amplify the protests.” The story included some speculation about foreign influence: “There is little evidence—at least so far—that the countries have provided material or organizational support to the protests,” Steven Lee Myers and Tiffany Hsu wrote. If there was any evidence, they did not present it.

The journalists blamed the protests for having “allowed” these “foreign influence campaigns…to shift their propaganda to focus on the Biden administration’s strong support for Israel.”

ADL’s Jonathan Greenblatt on CNN (4/29/24): “There’s no rule that says the school needs to tolerate students or, again, outside activists dressing like they’re in Al Qaeda.”

Beyond foreign influence, another conspiracy theory pushed by corporate media about student protesters is that they are influenced by “outside agitators.” While people who are not students have joined the protests, the term has long been used to delegitimize movements and portray them as led by nefarious actors.

New York City Mayor Eric Adams was an early source of this claim, announcing at a press conference (4/30/24) that Columbia students have “been co-opted by professional outside agitators.” He made a similar statement in mid-April as well (4/21/24).

On MSNBC (5/1/24), NYPD deputy police commissioner Kaz Daughtry defended the claim, holding up a bicycle lock with a substantial metal chain that police had found at Columbia. “This is not what students bring to school,” he said. In fact, Columbia sells the bike lock at a discount to students (FAIR.org, 5/9/24).

CNN‘s Anderson Cooper (4/29/24) asked the Anti Defamation League’s Jonathan Greenblatt about the outside agitators, “How many of them are actually students?” “A lot of them are not students,” Greenblatt replied, adding unironically: “You can’t even tell who’s an outside agitator and who’s an actual student.”

CNN senior political commentator David Axelrod tweeted (4/30/24): “It will be interesting to learn how many of those arrested in Hamilton Hall at Columbia are actually students.”

“I really believe they are brainwashed,” Donald Trump (Fox News, 4/30/24) said of student protesters.

Former president Donald Trump made a similar claim on Fox (4/30/24). “I really think you have a lot of paid agitators, professional agitators in here too, and I see it all over. And you know, when you see signs and they’re all identical, that means they’re being paid by a source,” he told Fox host Sean Hannity. He continued: “These are all signs that are identical. They’re made by the same printer.”

It’s worth noting that a political movement is not like an intercollegiate athletic competition, where it’s cheating for non-students to play on a college team; it’s not illegitimate for members of the broader community to join an on-campus protest, any more than it’s unethical for students to take part in demonstrations in their neighborhoods.

“If you’re a protester who’s planned it, you want all outsiders to join you,” Justin Hansford of the Thurgood Marshall Civil Rights Center told PolitiFact (5/6/24). “That’s why this is such a silly concept.”

That didn’t stop the New York Post (5/7/24) from publishing an op-ed by former New York Lt. Gov. Betsy McCaughey  headlined “Pursue Anti-Israel ‘Outside Agitators’ Disrupting Colleges—and End the Nonsense for Good.” McCaughey wrote, “Ray Kelly, former NYPD commissioner, nailed it Sunday when he said the nationwide turmoil ‘looks like a conspiracy.’” It looks like a conspiracy theory, anyway.

NYPD deputy police commissioner Kaz Daughtry (Fox 5 New York, 4/23/24): “Look at the tents. They all were the same color. They all were the same type of tents.”

One key piece of evidence offered for the “outside agitators” claim was the uniformity of many of the encampments’ tents. When Fox 5 New York (4/23/24) invited two NYPD representatives to discuss the protests, NYPD’s Daughtry said: “Look at the tents. They all were the same color. They all were the same type of tents.” He continued: “To me, I think somebody’s funding this. Also, there are professional agitators in there that are just looking for something to be agitated about, which are the protests.”

“Somebody’s behind this, and we’re going to find out who it is,” Daughtry said.

That students might be observing the world and their role in it, and acting accordingly, was not considered.

Newsweek (4/23/24) quoted Daughtry’s claim with no rebuttal or attempt to evaluate its veracity, under the headline, “Police Investigating People ‘Behind’ Pro-Palestinian Protests.” Fox News anchor Bret Baier (4/23/24) also cited the tents as a smoking gun: “We do see, it is pretty organized. The tents all look the same. And it’s expanding.”

The problem with this conspiracy theory is that the look-alike tents at most encampments were not expensive at all. As HellGateNYC (4/24/24) pointed out, the two-person tents seen at Columbia cost $28 on Amazon (where they’re the first listing that comes up when you search “cheap camping tent”), and the ones at NYU were even cheaper, at $15. While many Columbia students receive financial aid, the basic  cost of tuition, fees, room and board at the school is $85,000 a year. What’s another $15?

Fox News (4/26/24): “Progressive anti-Israel agitators across the country…are associated with groups tied to far-left groups with radical associations backed by dark money and liberal mega-donor George Soros.”

And finally, some news outlets alleged that the student protesters are funded by financier George Soros. For example, Fox (4/26/24) reported that a group that funds National Students for Justice in Palestine (NSJP) received a donation from an unnamed nonprofit that is funded by Soros. Fox was apparently referring to the Tides Foundation, a philanthropy that Soros has given money to; Tides gave $132,000 to WESPAC, a Westchester, N.Y., peace group that serves as a financial sponsor to NSJP in Palestine (PolitiFact, 5/2/24; Washington Post, 4/26/24). In standard conspiratorial reasoning, this three-times-removed connection means that, as Fox put it, protests attended by SJP members are “backed by dark money and liberal mega-donor George Soros.”

The New York Post (4/26/24) published a similar piece, headlined “George Soros Is Paying Student Radicals Who Are Fueling Nationwide Explosion of Israel-Hating Protests.”

On NewsNation (5/1/24), House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) also suggested Soros may be connected, saying that the FBI should investigate:

I think the FBI needs to be all over this. I think they need to look at the root causes and find out if some of this was funded by—I don’t know—George Soros or overseas entities. There’s sort of a common theme and a common strategy that seems to be pursued on many of these campuses.

“It looked pretty orchestrated to me,” NewsNation host Blake Burman agreed.

Soros is a billionaire philanthropist who survived the Holocaust. He has come to represent an antisemitic trope among right wingers of a puppet master controlling events behind the scenes (see FAIR.org, 3/7/22). To put it simply, these supposedly antisemitic protesters are now on the receiving end of antisemitism.

Featured image: New York Post graphic (4/26/24) alleging that Jewish billionaire George Soros is bankrolling “Israel hate camps.”

From granular coverage of the career triumphs of nepo babies and the goings-on at elite universities, to deep dives about luxury real estate and ritzy goods and services most people have never heard of, it’s clear that the New York Times’ most cherished subject is the One Percent.

This is driven by prurient fascination with the lives of the rich and powerful, mixed with a priggish desire to shame them for individual consumer choices. (“Owning or operating a superyacht is probably the most harmful thing an individual can do to the climate”—4/10/23.) This reflects the class and educational background of Times staffers, many of whom are status-obsessed graduates of elite institutions whose personal wealth and privilege, or proximity to it, skews their worldview.

The New York Times (5/14/24) reports on how luxury hotels are offering “ever-more-lavish activities for guests,” including a “personalized shopping extravaganza”($2,860), an “Enlightenment Retreat” with “four days of holistic treatments ($5,745) or an “invitation to an artist’s private studio to learn about their process” ($7,500).

Here is the Times (5/4/24) on Dylan Lauren, the paradoxically svelte “candy queen of New York City” and empress of the boutique candy store chain Dylan’s Candy Bar:

Ms. Lauren, who is the daughter of the fashion designer Ralph Lauren, lives on the Upper East Side and in Bedford, N.Y., with her husband of nearly 13 years, Paul Arrouet, 53, who is a managing partner at a private equity firm, and their 9-year-old fraternal twins Cooper Blue and Kingsley Rainbow.

Yachts, butlers and “next-level” hotels are of keen and constant interest. The paper (4/10/23) declared last year:

If you’re a billionaire with a palatial boat, there’s only one thing to do in mid-May: Chart your course for Istanbul and join your fellow elites for an Oscars-style ceremony honoring the builders, designers and owners of the world’s most luxurious vessels.

This May alone, the Times ran stories on multimillion-dollar designer “eco-yachts” (“‘silent luxury’ is fast displacing opulence”—5/10/24), luxury hotel experiences (“From cooking with a Michelin-star chef to taking a chauffeured shopping spree in Singapore, hotels and resorts are offering ever-more-lavish activities for guests”—5/14/24), and a new breed of butler employed by “the One Percent of the One Percent” (“The modern butler…is no longer a grandfatherly type in morning trousers that stays in the background, if not out of sight”—5/14/24).

The founders of Betches Media have “the chance to make another $30 million if the company can reach certain revenue and profit targets by 2026” (New York Times, 5/11/24).

The paper finds much to admire in buzzy businesses founded by millennial and Gen Z entrepreneurs. Take Betches Media, a women’s humor company that satirizes the “affluent social cohort” of young women who grew up in the “well-to-do” Long Island suburb of Roslyn, and joined sororities while undergrads at Cornell University. Industry watchers “took notice” last fall when the company’s founders sold it to LBG Media for $24 million, the Times (5/11/24) reported. (The term “betch” is  meant to “mock the preferences of a type of shallow, higher-income, college-educated woman,” who is also most likely white.) The sale netted the three founders around $8 million apiece. One told the Times she had treated herself to a gold Cartier watch; another said she had refreshed her wardrobe.

Several former Betches employees complained that many of the rank-and-file workers were underpaid, with some earning around $50,000 a year to churn out the content that made the business a success. Yet the focus on the more-affluent-than-ever founders suggests that the Times is more interested in winners who can afford Cartier watches than in the grumbling of those left behind.

The fact that the Betches Media founders attended Cornell is not an incidental detail. The Times’ coverage of Ivy League schools and their alumni sometimes suggests that if a phenomenon didn’t happen at an elite university, it didn’t really happen at all.

A 2021 story (6/7/21) on a Yale Law School kerfuffle dubbed “Dinner Party-gate” claimed that the episode exposed a culture that pitted “student against student” and “professor against professor,” forcing the school to confront a “venomous divide.” Far from being a tempest in a teapot, this was indicative of a broader cultural shift: Students at Yale Law now “regularly attack their professors, and one another, for their scholarship, professional choices and perceived political views.” In a place “awash in rumor and anonymous accusations,” the paper breathlessly continued, “almost no one would speak on the record.”

What exactly was “Dinner Party–gate,” and why did the Times consider it a story of compelling national interest? A group of students alleged that Amy Chua, a “popular but polarizing” professor, had been hosting drunken dinner parties with other students, and possibly federal judges, during the pandemic. Five paragraphs in, and after “more than two dozen interviews with students, professors and administrators,” the Times doggedly reported, “possibly the only sure thing in the murky saga is this: There is no hard proof that Ms. Chua is guilty of what she was originally accused of doing.” Nevertheless, the story persisted for an astonishing 36 paragraphs.

A New York Times (11/3/17) love story: “When the night was over, they departed to their separate yachts.”

In addition to small private parties that may or may not have taken place at Yale Law School, the Times is always on hand to cover larger and more luxurious private parties. The principals of a 2017 wedding chronicled by the Times (11/3/17) met on a yachting excursion off the coast of Croatia. After the ceremony, “guests were greeted by two trumpeters in medieval attire at the Metropolitan Club on 60th Street,” and the bridal couple, who “created their own family crest” for their wedding invitations, menus, wax seals, programs, napkins and cake, departed the venue atop a white carriage drawn by two white Percherons.

In 2019, the Times (2/22/19) covered the union of law firm associate Yelena Ambartsumian and engineer and executive Miroslav Grajewski. Both are avid art collectors whose romance was fueled by “robust curiosity” and “the desire to build a legacy.” The art they’ve acquired includes pieces “priced in the tens of thousands or more.” (High-end art notwithstanding, the bride assured the Times, “We’re not oligarchs.”)

The couple married at St. Illuminator’s Armenian Apostolic Cathedral in Manhattan, and held their reception at Eleven Madison Park, a Manhattan restaurant the Michelin guide describes as a “temple of modern elegance” where “nothing is out of place and everything is custom made, from the staff’s suits to the handblown water vases.” Dinner for two, with wine, now costs $1,314.

Toward the end of the ceremony, the Times reported, the officiant “placed gilded coronets on the heads of the bride and groom, an Armenian tradition anointing the couple as the rulers of their domestic kingdom.”

It’s not just parties and weddings, but the luxury goods and services purchased for them, that catch the Times’ eye. In April, the paper (4/13/24) wrote about the cake designer Bastien Blanc-Tailleur, who creates “opulent confections” for “high-profile clients,” including European aristocrats, movie stars, fashion designers, and Saudi and Bahraini royals. Blanc-Tailleur’s wedding cakes start at 7,500 euros, or around $8,100, while simpler cakes, which start at roughly $3,700, are “relatively more affordable.”

“People now look at pictures of others who might have incomes 10 to 100 times what we have,” a New York Times article (​​7/16/19) observes—referring to social media, though it could be talking about its own lifestyle coverage.

As fascinated as the Times is by the lifestyles of the rich and famous, it takes care to note that the luxe life is not for everyone. In a 2019 essay (​​7/16/19) on “Go Broke or Go Home Bachelorette Parties,” the paper tackled tough questions like, “What happens when friends are consumed by wanting their bachelorette parties to be picture perfect at any cost?” (Answer: “Credit cards are maxed out and debt rises.”)

Yet even essays warning against mindless excess tend to glamorize it at the same time. “The cost of bachelorette parties is ever growing, with weekend wedding festivities at destination locales now the norm,” the author noted, adding that millennials like her are “going broke” to attend. She then described a bachelorette outing she was invited to: “a long weekend in Spain from my home in Clifton, England, with an itinerary packed with VIP yacht trips, exclusive booths in glamorous nightclubs, a luxury villa and afternoon teas at high-end restaurants.” Suddenly racking up a little credit card debt doesn’t sound so bad!

Attraction to the sweet life is part of our culture. But readers would be better served by a newspaper that scrutinized rather than fetishized wealth and consumption.

Yahoo (5/31/24)

This week on CounterSpin: Surprising no one, Donald Trump and his sycophants responded to his 34-count conviction on charges of lying in business records by claiming that the trial was “rigged,” the judge and jury corrupt, that it was somehow Joe Biden’s doing, and “you know who else was persecuted? Jesus Christ.” Trump publicly calling the judge a “devil,” and Bible-thumping House Speaker Mike Johnson and others showing up at the courthouse in Trump cosplay, were just some of the irregular, shall we say, elements of this trial. It is a moment to examine the right-wing media that have fomented this scary nonsense, but also to look to reporting from the so-called “mainstream” to go beyond the “some say, others differ” pablum we often see. We’ll talk with Matt Gertz, senior fellow at Media Matters, about press response to the trial and the verdict.

New York Times (11/21/16)

Also on the show: For some people the violent police crackdown on peaceful college students protesting their schools’ investments in Israel’s war on Palestinians has been eye-opening. For others, it’s one more example of the employment of law enforcement to brutally enforce corporate power. The fight led by Indigenous women against the Dakota Access pipeline is not long enough ago to have been forgotten. We’ll hear a bit from an August 2017 interview with North Dakota organizer Kandi Mossett.

Janine Jackson interviewed The Lever‘s Katherine Li about corporations’ First Amendment dodge for the May 31, 2024, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

Extra! (3–4/95)

Janine Jackson: CounterSpin listeners will likely know about what’s been called the “right-wing media machine.” It started, you could say, with ideologues and politicians with ideas, generally ideas about how to hurdle us back to at least the 19th century, legally and culturally. They then created think tanks and funded academics to polish up and promulgate those ideas. And they created and funded media outlets to push those ideas out.

It’s not, in other words, a reflection of a fortuitous coming together of like-minded individuals, but an echo chamber forged with the explicit purpose of maximizing a narrow viewpoint into a false consensus. The news article you read, after all, cites a professor and a pundit and a think tank and a guy on the street who read a thing, so it looks like multiple disparate sources who happen to agree.

Something analogous is happening now with corporations claiming the First Amendment says they don’t have to comply with regulations they don’t want to comply with, because those regulations reflect ideas that are “controversial,” and they can’t be compelled to take a public position on a controversial idea, like, for example, that climate disruption is real. It’s a weird, important maneuver, at once complicated and pretty simple, and it’s usefully unpacked in a recent piece by our guest.

Katherine Li is an editorial fellow at the Lever, where the piece, “Corporations Are Weaponizing Free Speech to Wreck the World,” appears. She joins us now by phone from Oakland, California. Welcome to CounterSpin, Katherine Li.

Katherine Li: Hi, Janine, very happy to be here. And let’s unpack this complicated piece.

JJ: Well, before we get to its current—you could say artful—employment, what is the “compelled speech” doctrine under the First Amendment? What do we think was the point of it when it was adopted?

KL: Well, as with the First Amendment, the compelled speech in the First Amendment—the original purpose is to say that the government cannot force people to say something they disagree with. That is perhaps illustrated in a very early compelled speech case that basically says that students do not have to stand up in school and salute the flag or the national anthem if they don’t want to.

Basically, it is to protect people from things that the government is forcing them to do, and it’s kind of to insulate people from government policies that impose things on them. The original intention, I do not believe, and experts I have interviewed for this story do not believe that the intention is for corporates to use such an argument in lawsuits.

Lever (5/23/24)

JJ: All right, well then, let me just move on to asking you to please lay out for us what you call, in the lead to this informative piece for TheLever.com, “the novel legal strategy” that some corporations are now “pioneering,” you say, which sounds very different than “relying on”; they’re kind of trying to make something new here. Explain what you’re seeing.

KL: So traditionally, like I have just mentioned it, is to protect people from the government imposing things on them. But what is considered as speech has really exploded when it comes to the corporate landscape: Are tax returns and contracts considered speech? What does that mean for our government’s power to look into financial wrongdoing, and prevent tax fraud and prevent money laundering, if all of those things are considered as speech, and the government cannot force anybody to “say” and disclose such information?

So the corporates have definitely spotted that, and they have been trying to argue that these financial documents are considered as speech. So it started with drug pricing, it starts with the Corporate Transparency Act, that once there’s a precedent in the court system that says these things are considered speech, more cases are being invited and more cases are coming in this specific landscape. So basically they are saying that these things are considered speech, and therefore the government cannot compel them to disclose this information.

At first it starts with financial information. And right now we’re seeing that in Medicare drug negotiations, it is also happening. These commercial speeches are, according to the lawyers and experts I have spoken to, they don’t believe that these things should be considered; they don’t believe that this so-called commercial speech should be afforded the same amount of protection as traditional political expression, for example, like protesting or writing something in the media, or being censored or being prevented or being forced to make a certain political expression in the non-commercial sense.

So that is why in the article, and according to my experts, they believe this is a new strategy, that corporates are basically exploiting this argument in order to bring more and more cases, and expand the definition of what speech is.

Verge (9/12/23)

JJ: Right. So then they seem as though they are complying with a law, or relying on a law, rather than sort of forging this new way.

Well, I think the examples really bring it home for people, what’s happening here, and there are a number of those examples in the piece, and each one is more disturbing and illuminating than the last. But one key one is, California has a new emissions disclosure law, that major companies doing business in California have to make public how much pollution they’re emitting throughout their supply chain. And we can understand why that’s important, because a company can say, “Well, our home office is zero emissions,” and that’s great, but what about your factories? What’s happening there?

So the public needs this information, this is information that the public is looking for, to get through the PR that these companies—fossil fuel companies in this case—might be putting out. And they’re saying, “No, we don’t need to comply with an emissions disclosure law, because that’s speech”?

KL: That is precisely what is happening. And the thing is, these emissions laws, they target companies with annual revenue above $1 billion. That is not asking our local coffee shop or the marketplace around the corner to figure out how much emissions are in their supply chain. It only really applies to large companies, especially oil companies, very large agricultural factory-farming companies.

So what initially caught my eye in the story is actually the arguments they have in the complaints that they filed against the emission disclosures law. The complaint, if you read it very closely, to anybody with common sense, it almost sounds ridiculous. Some of the arguments are saying that they fear that disclosing their emissions would allow activists, nonprofits and lawmakers to single out companies for investigation, which to me is just another word for accountability. I mean, that’s what our nonprofits and lawmaking agencies, it’s what they’re supposed to do, investigate and help create policy that can improve lives. So to me, it sounds like their effort to avoid accountability is very thinly veiled.

If you look at their complaint very closely, they also complain that this law would be compelling them to change their behavior. They complain that this law is changing and shaping their behavior, when, in reality, isn’t that what any laws and regulations are supposed to do? I mean, in any daily-life law, such as, like, hey, you cannot jaywalk, that is aiming to shape our behaviors, it’s aiming to change our behaviors.

So if you read the complaint closely, their efforts to avoid accountability, it’s honestly very thinly veiled. And it is, in a way, further expanding what is considered as speech, and also the whole circular argument that climate change is somehow “controversial.”

I also looked into the threshold of what could be considered as controversial when I first read their complaint. So then the lawyers I was talking to, the question I brought to them was, how low is the threshold to prove that something is scientifically controversial? And it turned out my instincts were correct, that the threshold of that is extremely low. They just have to prove that there’s a dissenting opinion. They don’t really have to prove that it is scientifically sound, and there’s no one to really check that.

JJ: So it’s just laid in a lap of particular courts, or particular decision makers. And it sounds as though they’re saying, particularly with that low threshold—or that very vague, undetermined threshold—that any regulation, because any regulation is about shaping behavior, it sounds like any regulation, they can dispute, because it’s aimed at asking them to do something different. I mean, am I misreading that, or is it really anti- any regulation whatsoever, in some way?

KL: In some way, that’s what it sounds like. Because if the complaint is about changing and shaping behavior, any regulations, that’s the point of it, changing behavior. And what is so wrong, what could be so wrong about forcing someone to lower their emissions at this point? It sounds like they’re saying that they shouldn’t lower their emissions, because either climate change doesn’t matter enough, or that climate change is not real. Like they said, they think it’s controversial.

JJ: Right. Well, just in case folks don’t understand, and of course we’ll send them to TheLever.com to read the piece, but you also have a food distribution and a restaurant supplies company, Cisco, that’s saying that you can’t force companies to read out notices of labor violations to workers, because they don’t want to. They don’t want to make that information available. And if they talk about labor violations in the workplace, well, that’s a “confession of sins,” and they shouldn’t be forced to do that. So this can reach into pretty much any area of our life, yeah?

KL: Yeah, definitely. Companies argue that if there has been a labor dispute, whatever the result is of that dispute, the company would post a sign somewhere in the facility, basically detailing the labor violation. But it doesn’t really achieve the same effect as reading it out in front of everybody, because it’s the difference between passively posting a sign somewhere and actively informing people what happened. And obviously, if a company has labor violations, they likely don’t want their workers to know. And if workers have also suffered the same violation, if the company reads it out, they might become more aware of it.

JJ: Well, it’s funny—if by funny, we mean perverse—because the narrative of capitalism that we often hear is that it relies on everyone being an informed economic actor, an individual actor who is making economic choices based on knowledge. And here we have corporations actively trying to reduce the available amount of information that a person could have to make decisions about what to buy or where to work or anything like that. It’s weird. This is how corporate capitalism subverts this notion that we hear about Capitalism 101, and building a better mousetrap, and all of that sort of thing.

Katherine Li: “They’re actually afraid that this information is going to get out and impact their profits, so that a lot of times their greenwashing or disinformation isn’t going to work anymore.”

KL: Definitely. Well, about the emissions case, part of their complaint is also that they might be more susceptible to boycott. I do believe that in this day and age, especially people of the younger generations, they’re much more aware of climate change, and a lot of times they would choose companies and products based on their perception of whether that company is being socially responsible enough.

So it’s obvious that a lot of corporates have caught up on that, and they’re now afraid that if they disclose how much they’re actually emitting, people are going to stop buying from them. They’re actually afraid that this information is going to get out and impact their profits, so that a lot of times their greenwashing or disinformation isn’t going to work anymore, because there will be a real concrete number for people to go on, and a number they cannot fake.

They could put on their website all they want, that we have this commitment in 10 years, we have this kind of green commitment; we’re going to become zero emissions by 2030. They could say what they want to say on their website, but once there’s a concrete number out there, none of that is going to work anymore. And they’re really afraid of that, clearly.

JJ: Afraid of an informed public.

Well, this only works with a certain kind of judicial landscape. I mean, you have to count on not getting laughed out of court with what looks to many people like a fairly transparent shenanigan, but obviously they believe that, for some reason, courts are going to be open to this particular kind of argument.

KL: Yes, unfortunately, multiple times courts have been open to this particular argument. And in terms of science, in California, the well-known case would be the Monsanto case.

Food & Water Watch (4/5/17)

For everyone who doesn’t know, Monsanto is a herbicide company. They make this herbicide called Roundup, and there is a certain chemical in it, where a lot of international scientists have said that it could potentially cause cancer in humans. So because science is never 100%, and that knowledge is constantly evolving, there is a loophole for them to say that there is contradicting science. And as we have later found out, Monsanto, the company, has also commissioned scientific studies to say that their product is safe.

And in California, that stood up in court. Because the court doesn’t really look at whether or not Monsanto has engineered this controversy that they’re claiming, this argument was allowed to pass California Proposition 65, which requires a warning label for a whole host of chemicals that could be cancerous and cause birth defects–Monsanto would not have to put that label on their specific herbicide product, because this whole “scientific controversy” thing was allowed to stand up in court.

So the consequences of that is now this argument was expanded. It’s not just one chemical anymore. It’s the entire mechanism of climate change that is being brought into question.

BioSpace (5/8/24)

But the good news here is that sometimes courts are also beginning to hold the line, and recently there have been some positive developments. If you look at the most recent case of the Medicare drug negotiations under the Inflation Reduction Act, I believe it is the US Chamber of Commerce and different pharmaceutical companies, they were arguing that the Medicare drug negotiations, that the Inflation Reduction Act, is trying to “compel” them to agree with a government-determined price, and that they’re saying that is compelled speech.

So they have brought that point to multiple federal courts, including, most recently I believe, a federal court in Ohio. And these courts have fortunately rejected this argument, basically blocked the case on multiple occasions. So I do believe that courts are becoming aware of that, and that they’re beginning to curb these arguments, because in the past, when they have allowed these arguments to pass, sometimes, likely in the next case, the argument becomes expanded.

JJ: Right. Well, I was going to push you further on that, in terms of, it sounds like courts are cottoning on and pushing back. Are there other policy or legislative responses that seem appropriate here, or is it mainly a matter for the courts? And then, do you have thoughts about—because I have not seen this in other reporting—what media might do in terms of disclosing this, putting some sunlight on this, as part of a pushback against what seems clearly like an anti-regulatory, anti–public information effort?

KL: Well, to answer the first question, I do believe this matter is mainly up to the courts, even though, in terms of lawmaking, there can be laws that make up for what the courts are not doing. At the end of the story that I wrote about this, I mentioned a doctrine called the major questions doctrine. A lot of times what the states are allowed to do and what the states are allowed to regulate, what the federal agencies are allowed to regulate in states, is significantly limited. So a lot of times, these things become left up to courts in a major case, to basically make a decision on whether what the individual states are doing is lawful or not.

I believe that if the federal regulatory agencies oftentimes could have more power to pass more sweeping regulations on these things, and that federal regulatory agencies could have more power to fight these law cases if they are sued on a particular point, for example, like the Inflation Reduction Act…. I believe that federal agencies should be given more power to decide, instead of leaving it up to the courts, because the court doesn’t always hold the line.

They’re beginning to, but, for example, the California emissions disclosure case, it’s still very much up in the air, and it’s an entirely new regulation. No other states have implemented it yet; it’s just California, and there are no federal regulations on how companies could be more accountable for the emissions they’re putting out.

And in terms of how media could report on this, I would say, a lot of times, this type of story, it’s very, very helpful to talk to lawyers, because a lot of the cases that I have found, and also trying to figure out how low the scientific threshold is to basically prove that something is controversial: the lawyers know. They are a treasure trove of past cases, because that is their job. And a lot of times, they really enjoy talking to journalists, laying out their cases, and basically walking you through the steps and loopholes that are in our law, because that is their profession.

I would also say, I can understand that sometimes it’s hard to write about something that doesn’t have a main human character in it. Sometimes it’s hard to make it interesting, and it could be easy to overlook these stories. But personally, I think that even a seemingly boring document could contain very interesting information.

For example, the initial complaint that’s filed against the California Emissions Disclosure Law, if you look at the information closely, it might look like a boring document, but the more you read, you’re like, “Wow, this doesn’t make sense. Am I hallucinating this, or is this real?” So then you go to a lawyer, and verify that information. Is this a trend I’m spotting? Is this a problem? Do you think it’s a problem? And these kind of stories could end up being very interesting.

And I would say that, also, it’s important to look into lobbying data, and frame the story looking at who is responsible, and not only looking at what the problem is. I feel like stories could become much more powerful when you look at the how, the mechanism, the larger mechanism that’s at work, instead of only focusing on one specific event or one isolated event that’s happening. Sometimes the more people, the more professionals, you talk to, you start to see a network and a storyline, and how there’s a loophole, and the mechanism of how things work behind the scenes.

JJ: Absolutely. Well, that’s excellent. We’ll end it there for now.

We’ve been speaking with Katherine Li. She’s editorial fellow at the Lever, online at TheLever.com, where you can find this informative article, “Corporations Are Weaponizing Free Speech to Wreck the World,” that we’ve been talking about. Thank you so much, Katherine Li, for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

KL: Thank you so much. It’s a pleasure.

Claudia Sheinbaum has made history. A leftist from the ruling party and former head of government for Mexico City, she will be Mexico’s first woman and first Jewish president. But all the US press wants to know is whether she is just going to be a puppet of the big, scary outgoing President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, popularly known as AMLO.

AP (5/22/24): “Sheinbaum has to be very careful…to avoid appearing to contradict or criticize López Obrador.”

The AP (5/22/24) said Sheinbaum left “many wondering whether she can escape the shadow of the larger-than-life incumbent.” Vox (6/2/24) said, on the issues of government corruption and narco violence, “Now the question is to what extent Sheinbaum will be able to make progress on these concerns while operating under the shadow of her mentor.”

The New York Times (5/30/24) said that “she has an image problem, and she knows it.” The article explained: “Many Mexicans are wondering: Can she be her own leader? Or is she a pawn of the current president?”

A Washington Post (2/28/24) columnist called Sheinbaum AMLO’s “heir,” and wrote that while she “is more of a mystery…she has people worried.” The Christian Science Monitor (5/28/24) also called her AMLO’s “hand-picked successor.” The New York Times (6/4/24) also said that “some observers believe [AMLO] will find a way to continue to exert influence behind the scenes” after he leaves, calling Sheinbaum his “handpicked successor.”

Mary Anastasia O’Grady, Americas columnist for the Wall Street Journal (5/26/24), went further, saying Sheinbaum is not just an extension of AMLO, but a threat to democracy itself, as she was “handpicked by the president” and “is a symbol of continuity with his agenda.” She accused Sheinbaum of wanting “to crush pluralism and grab control of the Supreme Court,” forcing Mexico to revert “to a one-party state, as it was during the 71-year rule of the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI.”

By virtue of Mexican law, AMLO can only serve one term. The idea that a party winning two elections in a row, potentially tipping the balance of the court, is somehow a reversion to the seven decades of PRI rule is a bit of a stretch; would Hillary Clinton have created a “one-party state” if she had won the US presidency in 2016? It’s also misleading to call Sheinbaum “hand-picked,” as she won AMLO’s support only after a messy intra-party struggle, as is common in the democratic political battlefield (AP, 10/6/22; Foreign Policy, 6/9/23).

For Time (5/30/24), the “tragedy” was that few Mexicans wanted to vote for the candidate who represented the two parties that had governed their country for 72 years before 2018.

Time (5/30/24) also complained that Sheinbaum was the “anointed” AMLO replacement, saying the problem of her victory is “how easily this triumph has been handed to her.” “Most Mexicans don’t necessarily adore the current government,” Alex González Ormerod wrote, but they “simply have not been given a decent alternative to vote for.”

This kind of pabulum is an observation any half-educated analyst could have made about a random election in the United States, France or Iran. Yet the fact that there is not a viable pro-rich political movement in Mexico is treated as an existential crisis for the US press.

If AMLO’s record and Sheinbaum’s proposals for her term were so terrible, one might imagine that opposition parties could take advantage of that. “The majority of her support comes from AMLO,” said Andalusia Knoll Soloff, an independent journalist based in Mexico, in a phone interview. “She appeals to the values of the people of AMLO.” But she added that it is an exaggeration to say she’s made in the mold of the outgoing president, saying it is “untrue that she is a puppet of AMLO.”

What is happening here is the media myth that Sheinbaum, a scientist and successful left-wing politician, somehow lacks any agency of her own, when it is perfectly sensical that AMLO’s party would want to continue many of his policies in a second term. AMLO, like Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela, sits in the American media consciousness as a thuggish caudillo who is undermining the goals of US businesses in Latin America, a kind of act of war against the Monroe Doctrine.

Politico (6/1/24) wonders whether Sheinbaum will “prioritize efficiency over ideology, or be “a mere puppet of López Obrador” and “follow in his leftist footsteps.”

Thus Sheinbaum is viewed with suspicion. Examine, for instance, this summary from Politico (6/1/24), which wondered whether Sheinbaum would govern as “pragmatist” or “ideologue”:

On one hand, [Sheinbaum’s] an accomplished physicist with expertise in environmental science and a reputation for pragmatism. On the other, she’s a long-time leftist activist, a close ally and champion of López Obrador—a divisive figure who came to power promising to represent the lowest echelons of Mexican society and, during his tenure, increased social spending to a historic high while simultaneously attacking Mexico’s system of checks and balances.

In what world are these two incompatible things? It’s quite easy that someone can be a devotee of science and also prefer politics that help the poor and working class over the rich—just ask Albert Einstein (Monthly Review, 5/1/09) or Carl Sagan (New York Post, 10/5/20).

But Politico made its particular definitions of “pragmatist” and “ideologue” clear later, when it suggested that “a more ideological and leftist Sheinbaum” might “seek more beneficial terms for Mexico” in upcoming trade talks with the US and Canada, while a “more pragmatic Sheinbaum…could find compromises when discussing trade, and agree on a middle ground for investigating cartels with US support without risking Mexico’s sovereignty.” In other words: “pragmatic” means doing what’s best for the US, “ideological” means doing what’s best for the Mexican people she represents.

The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board (6/3/24) also used this dichotomy. “Markets will be looking to see which Claudia Sheinbaum emerges in office—the ideologue or a more pragmatic deal-maker,” the paper said. It added that she “has promised to put the poor first, but that means Mexico’s economy will need to keep growing.” In the Journal‘s worldview, this means “policies that attract foreign capital to expand prosperity.”

“For those hoping Mexico will fully embrace climate protection, natural-resource conservation and clean energy policies,” EcoAmericas (4/23) last year said Sheinbaum might be “a ray of hope.”

Sheinbaum’s climate policies for Mexico City, once known for its terrible pollution, have also bolstered her progressive politics. Visitors to Mexico City today find a world-class capital with clean streets and lovely parks, aided by a large public transit system.

Nature (5/30/24) reported:

[Supporters] point to her time spent governing Mexico City, when she made significant advancements in science by initiating the construction of the world’s largest urban photovoltaic plant, which cost 661 million pesos (US$39 million) to build.

It added that her “administration also established the first rapid-transit network of buses in the city—and in Latin America—that run on electricity.” EcoAmericas (4/23) reported on her environmental policy in Mexico City, saying her agenda included “rainwater harvesting, green-space expansion, watershed conservation, extensive planting initiatives, air-quality improvement [and] waste reduction,” as well as improving the city’s transit system. And the Wilson Center (10/24/23) noted that as environmental secretary in the city government, Sheinbaum oversaw “the creation of the first line of the metrobús, Mexico City’s bus rapid transit system.”

By contrast, AMLO’s unmoored populism put him at odds with climate activists (AP, 8/28/20, 3/23/22, 11/24/23; Guardian, 11/8/22). Sheinbaum has disappointed environmental activists with promises to increase oil production as president, but has also promised a major investment in green energy (New Republic, 5/31/24). She has vowed “to accelerate the energy transition with new solar, wind and hydropower projects” (Argus, 4/17/24). AMLO had “tended to prioritize domestic fossil fuel resources over low-carbon alternatives” (Yale Climate Connections, 4/10/24).

As Reuters (5/28/24) noted, Sheinbaum and the outgoing president are indeed allies, but hardly the same; Sheinbaum, the scientist, took the Covid pandemic seriously, while AMLO fell to anti-mask populism.

There’s a racist connotation against Latin Americans that a second term for a leftist coalition means there is a Svengali calling all the shots without popular consent. With Sheinbaum, there is also the insinuation that a woman could simply not rise to this level without a “strong man” behind her.

It remains to be seen how Sheinbaum will actually govern, but since, like AMLO, she does not promise to accede to every US demand, the US press corps has already settled comfortably into its time-worn tradition of casting the election of a leftist Latin American as undemocratic.