FAIR

 

New York State Assembly member Zohran Mamdani handily won the New York City Democratic mayoral primary in June, despite corporate media’s best attempts to discredit and suppress his campaign. But his opponents are not giving up, and Mamdani faces three noteworthy challengers in the general election.

Former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s humiliating defeat, incumbent Mayor Eric Adams’ overwhelming unpopularity and Republican Curtis Sliwa’s eccentricities have not stopped the Wall Street Journal from trying to discourage New Yorkers from voting for Mamdani in the general election. Once primary results became official on July 1, the Journal published ten op-eds in a single week (7/1–7/25) that cast Mamdani in a negative light.

Red scare

Mary Anastasia O’Grady (Wall Street Journal, 7/6/25) denounced Zohran Mamdani’s “plan to turn New York into an Orwellian ‘Animal Farm’ of equality.”

Mamdani is a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, which to the Wall Street Journal is equivalent to Stalinism. There are currently six mayors in America who are DSA members, and none of them have implemented purges or rounded up billionaires into gulags. That does not stop the Journal’s opinion writers from fearmongering about a dystopian future under Mamdani.

Under the headline “The Lure of Comrade Mamdani,” former Merrill Lynch strategist and current Heritage Foundation affiliate Mary Anastasia O’Grady (7/6/25) asked, “Have you made something of yourself? If so, [Mamdani is] coming for you.” O’Grady attacked Mamdani’s progressive platform through references to Argentina, Cuba and Venezuela, blaming their economic struggles on socialist leaders. She made no mention, of course, of the US interventionist policies—including not just coups and coup attempts, but also strangling economic blockades and punishments—that were key drivers of those struggles.

Columnist Jason L. Riley (7/1/25) offered readers a “Blueprint for Defeating Zohran Mamdani”: the 2021 Buffalo mayoral election. His op-ed gleefully recounted that when Black democratic socialist India Walton won the Democratic primary there, business elites collaborated with Republicans and establishment Democrats to flood the general election with money and crush her campaign in favor of “corrupt, incompetent” (Jacobin, 11/3/21) incumbent Byron Brown.

Sadanand Dhume (Wall Street Journal, 7/2/25) accused Mamdani of importing “Third World” ideas like rent control (which New York City has had since 1943). 

Sadanand Dhume (7/2/25) of the right-wing American Enterprise Institute contributed the outrageously headlined op-ed, “Mamdani Brings Third World Prejudices to New York.” “Why would someone who emigrated to the US from a poor country champion ideas that keep poor countries poor?” he asked.

More than one writer compared Mamdani to Trump in terms of their extremism. In his piece, Gerard Baker (7/7/25) lambasted the “siren song of socialism,” suggesting that Mamdani and Trump similarly adhere to a “reality-challenging radicalism.” Mamdani shows that Democrats “refuse to reconcile with the new order,” and would rather “take their chances on the easy appeal of radical ideas.”

Meanwhile, Long Island Democratic Rep. Tom Suozzi (7/2/25) repeatedly drew parallels between Mamdani and Trump, and argued that New York would be destroyed by Mamdani’s “lofty, utopian promises: free public transit, free college tuition, more public housing, sweeping debt cancellation and massive overhauls of systems”—because they will be paid for by modestly increasing taxes on corporations and people making millions. Allysia Finley (7/6/25) took issue with Mamdani’s proposed tax increases for the wealthy, irrespective of the social benefits that money could provide.

Former hedge fund manager Jay Newman (7/7/25) published a satirical op-ed titled “Some Modest Proposals for Mamdani,” modeled on Jonathan Swift’s “A Modest Proposal.” While Swift’s essay was meant to bring attention to the plight of the Irish poor and the callousness of the English response, Newman used the format to mock Mamdani for wanting to respond to the homeless crisis. Newman suggested that Mamdani might convert the Metropolitan Museum of Art into public housing—ignoring the city’s tens of thousands of empty apartment units.

Israel: NYC’s sixth borough?

If polling is to be believed, the Jewish way is more to vote for Mamdani’s New York (Wall Street Journal, 7/3/25).

Much has been written about the Islamophobia and baseless accusations of antisemitism the Zionist establishment has hurled against Mamdani. The Wall Street Journal is a key player in that narrative. Five of the ten anti-Mamdani op-eds (7/2/25,  7/3/25, 7/3/25, 7/7/25, 7/7/25) included reference to Mamdani’s anti-Israel stance (or that of his supporters) as a means to paint him as unfit for office; all of these mentioned “Hamas,” “globalize the intifada” or both.

Dhume (7/2/25), who dedicated three entire paragraphs to Mamdani’s position on Israel, expressed outrage over Mamdani’s compliance with international law. He wrote that Mamdani “accuses the Jewish state of ‘genocide’ in Gaza. If elected, he said he would arrest Benjamin Netanyahu if the Israeli prime minister visits New York City.” This is presented as if Mamdani himself is making these accusations, rather than echoing the conclusions of several human rights organizations, and joining various world leaders in complying with the ICC’s arrest warrant for Netanyahu. (A Data for Progress poll—7/11-17/25—found that 78% of Democratic primary voters believe that Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinian people, and 63% think that New York’s mayor should enforce the warrant against Netanyahu.)

Multiple writers warned of a mass exodus of Jews from New York in the face of a Mamdani mayoralty. In an opinion interview with political consultant Hank Sheinkopf, Tunku Varadarajan (7/3/25) wrote that Sheinkopf

expects Jews will start to leave New York in substantial numbers. “Never mind the general election. Jews will think, ‘If Mamdani’s got this far, who knows what’s next?’ ” There are now three-quarters of a million Muslims in New York—nearly 9% of the population. Mr. Mamdani campaigned extensively in their neighborhoods.

It’s an Islamophobic version of the Great Replacement Theory, using a dubious outlier number for the Muslim population, which most sources report to be around 3% of the city’s population (compared to a Jewish population of 7%).

Sheinkopf also suggested that Mamdani’s New York would be “the capital of class war and hatred and antisemitism, where it’s OK for a mayor to say the intifada’s just fine.”

Meanwhile, Dovid Margolin (7/3/25) wrote that Jews in New York “are nervous” because they “know what it means to have to flee. They know what it looks like in America, too, when their homes are no longer safe and there is no one to call for help.”  He painted such a dire depiction of the predicament of Jews under a Mamdani administration that he felt he had to quote Lubavitcher Rebbe Menachem Schneerson, “One must stand firm and not run away.”

Despite the Journal’s allegations that Jewish New Yorkers are terrified of a Mamdani victory, his opponent Cuomo believes that “50% of the Jewish people voted for Mamdani” (Forward, 7/20/25). A recent poll by Zenith and Public Progress (7/16–24/25) found Mamdani getting a 43% plurality of the Jewish vote in a five-way race—vs. 26% for Cuomo. Mamdani was the choice of an overwhelming 67% of Jews between 18–44, with Cuomo having only 7% support from this group.

‘Useful idiot generation’

Mark Penn and Andrew Stein (Wall Street Journal, 7/7/25): “Call [Gen X] the Useful Idiot generation, mouthing slogans and causes they don’t understand and from which they would recoil if they did.”

Mamdani’s youthfulness—and that of his most enthusiastic voters—also irked some Journal writers, who took a “back in my day” approach, presenting ageist and easily debunkable claims about the negative influence Generation Z supposedly has on US politics.

Sheinkopf (7/3/25), for instance, argued that, because of their politics, “the kids are going to be the death of New York.” He called Gen Z “the most pampered generation in the history of the world…. I’m sorry they can’t buy an apartment. But they can buy a $9 latte, and a $100 dinner.”

Given that the average price of a two-bedroom apartment in Manhattan is $1.5 million, young people would have to forgo their imaginary daily latte and dinner for almost eight years before they could afford a down payment.

Varadarajan also criticized Mamdani for his privileged upbringing, contrasting it with Sheinkopf’s “hardscrabble background” in which he “‘cut corned beef at the Carnegie Deli’ as he put himself through college.” Neither Sheinkopf nor Varadarajan noted that around the time that Sheinkopf was attending college, the average yearly tuition for a US public college was $394. After adjusting for inflation, that’s a quarter of the cost in the 2020s.

The crown jewel of this argument, though, was an op-ed headlined “Gen Z: the Useful Idiot Generation” (7/7/25) by Democratic strategist/corporate lobbyist Mark Penn and disgraced former New York City politician Andrew Stein. They fret about the generation’s “radicalism,” which they argue stems from being “indoctrinated” at college (where, among other things, they supposedly “learn that socialism means free stuff”), delaying marriage and turning away from religion, all of which leaves them “unmoored.” They warned:

Socialism and antisemitism will continue to fester and grow if we don’t stand up and reform our universities, reinforce our basic values and balance our social media.

Though the primary results are finalized, the Wall Street Journal has joined with others in New York’s corporate media in trying to ensure that Mamdani’s success, and his supporters’ enthusiasm, ends there.

 

Even as media report more regularly on starvation in Gaza, coverage still tends to obscure responsibility—as with this CNN headline (7/26/25) blaming the baby’s death on the “starvation crisis” rather than on the US-backed Israeli government.

The headlines are increasingly dire.

• “Child Dies of Malnutrition as Starvation in Gaza Grows” (CNN, 7/21/25)
• “More Than 100 Aid Groups Warn of Starvation in Gaza as Israeli Strikes Kill 29, Officials Say” (AP, 7/23/25)
• “No Formula, No Food: Mothers and Babies Starve Together in Gaza” (NBC, 7/25/25)
• “Five-Month-Old Baby Dies in Mother’s Arms in Gaza, a New Victim of Escalating Starvation Crisis” (CNN, 7/26/25)
• “Gaza’s Children Are Looking Through Trash to Avoid Starving” (New York, 7/28/25)

This media coverage is urgent and necessary—and criminally late.

Devastatingly late to care

An informative Wall Street Journal chart (7/27/25) shows the complete cutoff of food into Gaza at the beginning of 2025—a genocidal policy decision by Israel that was not accompanied by increased coverage in US media of famine in the Strip.

Since the October 7 attacks, Israel has severely restricted humanitarian aid to the Gaza Strip, using starvation of civilians as a tool of war, a war crime for which Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Foreign Minister Yoav Gallant have been charged by the International Criminal Court. Gallant proclaimed a “complete siege” of Gaza on October 9, 2023: “There will be no electricity, no food, no fuel, everything is closed.”

Aid groups warned of famine conditions in parts of Gaza as early as December 2023. By April 2024, USAID administrator Samantha Power (CNN, 4/11/24) found it “likely that parts of Gaza, and particularly northern Gaza, are already experiencing famine.”

A modest increase in food aid was allowed into the Strip during a ceasefire in early 2025. But on March 2, 2025, Netanyahu announced a complete blockade on the occupied territory. Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir declared that there was “no reason for a gram of food or aid to enter Gaza.”

After more than two months of a total blockade, Israel on May 19 began allowing in a trickle of aid through US/Israeli “Gaza Humanitarian Foundation” (GHF) centers (FAIR.org, 6/6/25)—while targeting with snipers those who came for it—but it is not anywhere near enough, and the population in Gaza is now on the brink of mass death, experts warn. According to UNICEF (7/27/25):

The entire population of over 2 million people in Gaza is severely food insecure. One out of every three people has not eaten for days, and 80% of all reported deaths by starvation are children.

According to the Gaza Health Ministry, at least 147 Gazans have died from malnutrition since the start of Israel’s post–October 7 assault. Most have been in the past few weeks.

Mainstream politicians are finally starting to speak out—even Donald Trump has acknowledged “real starvation” in Gaza—but as critical observers have pointed out, it is devastatingly late to begin to profess concern. Jack Mirkinson’s Discourse Blog (7/28/25) quoted Refugees International president Jeremy Konyndyk:

I fear that starvation in Gaza has now passed the tipping point and we are going to see mass-scale starvation mortality…. Once a famine gathers momentum, the effort required to contain it increases exponentially. It would now take an overwhelmingly large aid operation to reverse the coming wave of mortality, and it would take months.

And there are long-term, permanent health consequences to famine, even when lives are saved (NPR, 7/29/25). Mirkinson lambasted leaders like Cory Booker and Hillary Clinton for failing to speak up before now: “It is too late for them to wash the blood from their hands.”

Barely newsworthy

Major US media, likewise, bear a share of responsibility for the hunger-related deaths in Gaza. The conditions of famine have been out in the open for well over a year, and yet it was considered barely newsworthy in US news media.

A MediaCloud search of online US news reports mentioning “Gaza” and either “famine” or “starvation” shows that since Netanyahu’s March 2 announcement of a total blockade—which could only mean rapidly increasing famine conditions—there was a brief blip of media attention, and then even less news coverage than usual for the rest of March and April. Media attention rose modestly in May, at a time when the world body that classifies famines announced in May that one in five people in Gaza were “likely to face starvation between May 11 and September 30″—in other words, that flooding Gaza with aid was of the highest urgency.

But as aid continued to be held up, and Gazans were shot by Israeli snipers when attempting to retrieve the little offered them, that coverage eventually dwindled, until the current spike that began on July 21.

FAIR (e.g., 3/22/24, 4/25/25, 5/16/25, 5/16/25) has repeatedly criticized US media for  coverage that largely absolves Israel of responsibility for its policy of forced starvation—what Human Rights Watch (5/15/25) called “a tool of extermination”—implemented with the backing of the US government.

The current headlines reveal that the coverage still largely diverts attention from Israeli (let alone US) responsibility, but it’s a positive development that major US news media are beginning to devote serious coverage to the issue. Imagine how different this all could have looked had they given it the attention it has warranted, and the accountability it has demanded, when alarms were first raised.

In the four days of coverage after President Donald Trump ordered strikes on Iran (6/21–24/25), the New York Times, USA Today, Wall Street Journal and Washington Post responded with 36 opinion pieces and editorials. Almost half of these, 17, explicitly supported the illegal bombing, while only 7 (19%) took an overall critical view of the strikes—none of them in the Journal or the Post.

Of the critical pieces, only three (one in the Times and two in USA Today) opposed the idea on legal or moral grounds, challenging the idea that the United States has a right to attack a country that had not attacked it.

This opposition rate of less than a fifth is in stark contrast to US public opinion on the matter, which showed that 56% of Americans opposed Trump’s bombing. Why wasn’t this reflected in the range of opinions presented by America’s top press outlets? These numbers highlight just how poorly represented the views of the public are in elite media.

‘Trump’s courageous and correct decision’

Bret Stephens (New York Times, 6/22/25) argued that bombing Iran without any evidence the country intended to build a nuclear weapon was “the essence of statesmanship.”

FAIR looked at all opinion pieces in the four papers that addressed Trump’s strikes on Iran, from June 21 through June 24. Forty-seven percent (17) explicitly praised Trump’s unauthorized act of war.

Many of these cheered the aggressive assertion of US power. The New York Times’ Bret Stephens (6/22/25) lauded “Trump’s Courageous and Correct Decision,” which “deserves respect, no matter how one feels about this president and the rest of his policies.” At the Washington Post, David Ignatius (6/22/25) offered similar praise under the headline, “Trump’s Iran Strike Was Clear and Bold,” and the Wall Street Journal’s editorial board (6/22/25) declared, “Trump Meets the Moment on Iran.”

USA Today (6/22/25) published columnist Nicole Russell’s “Trump Warned Iran. Then He Acted Boldly to Protect America.” The headline was later changed to an even more laudatory: “Trump Was Right to Bomb Iran. Even Democrats Will Be Safer Because of It.”  In a Wall Street Journal guest column (6/24/25), Karen Elliott House celebrated the “restor[ation] of US deterrence and credibility.”

Some directly attempted to defend the strikes’ legality. In a Post guest column (6/23/25), Geoffrey Corn, Claire Finkelstein and Orde Kittrie claimed to explain “Why Trump Didn’t Have to Ask Congress Before Striking Iran.” The piece relied extensively on the playground rhetorical tool of if they did it, why can’t I?, confidently listing earlier US presidents’ attacks that defied constitutional law, as if past violations justify the current one.

They asserted that “the operation also derives support from international law as an exercise of collective self-defense in defense of Israel,” ignoring the fact that international law does not allow you to “defend” yourself against a country that hasn’t attacked you—let alone the illogical formulation of the US engaging in “self-defense” on behalf of another country.

For the Wall Street Journal‘s art department (6/24/25), war is peace.

USA Today columnist Dace Potas (6/22/25), who called the attacks “strategically the right move and a just action,” also defended the constitutionality of Trump’s strikes, attacking Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s call to impeach Trump over the strikes:

If the president is not able to respond to a hostile regime building weapons that could destroy entire American cities, then I’m not sure what else, short of an actual invasion of the homeland, would allow for him to act.

That’s the thing about self-defense, though—it’s supposed to involve an attack.

Journal columnist Gerard Baker (6/23/25), who called the attack “judicious and pragmatic,” likewise pointed to Iran’s nuclear program, claiming that “no one seriously doubts the Iran nuclear threat”—despite both US intelligence and the International Agency for Atomic Energy concluding otherwise.

Yet another angle came from Times columnist Thomas Friedman (6/22/25), who argued that the “Attacks on Iran Are Part of a Much Bigger Global Struggle”—between the forces of “inclusion,” who believe in “more decent, if not democratic, governance,” and the forces of “resistance,” who “thrive on resisting those trends because conflict enables them to keep their people down.” Friedman called Trump’s strikes “necessary” for the right side to “triumph” in this good-vs-evil struggle.

Questions without criticism

The New York Times (6/22/25) figures you can’t go wrong by asserting total ignorance.

Of the remaining opinion pieces, ten accepted the strikes as a fait accompli and offered analysis that mostly speculated about the future and offered no anti-bombing pushback.

For instance, the Wall Street Journal published a commentary (6/23/25) asking “Can Iran Strike Back Effectively?” A New York Times op-ed (6/22/25) by security consultant Colin P. Clarke speculated about “How Iran Might Strike Back.”

The Times also published columnist W.J. Hennigan’s piece (6/22/25) that warned that “We Have No Idea Where This War Will Go.” Hennigan speculated: “It’s almost certain we haven’t seen the end of US military action in this war,” but he did not indicate whether this might be a good or bad thing.

Others were slightly more wary, such as a Times op-ed (6/23/25) headlined “What Bombs Can’t Do In Iran.” The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace’s Karim Sadjadpour asked, “Will this extraordinary act of war strengthen Tehran’s authoritarians or hasten their demise?” Sadjadpour tells readers that “while military strikes may expose an authoritarian regime’s weaknesses, they rarely create the conditions necessary for lasting democratic change”—yet he offers support for both possible outcomes.

Similarly, the Washington Post (6/22/25) published a triple-bylined opinion piece debating the question: “Will the US/Iran Conflict Spin Out of Control?” Participant Jason Rezaian did not criticize the bombing itself, only the lack of strategy around it, judging that Trump’s idea of “decimating Iran’s defenses and then letting them stay in power to terrorize their citizens, dissidents and opponents around the world would be a massive failure” and concluding, “my concern is that there is no plan to speak of.”

Attacking Trump, supporting war

Criticizing Donald Trump’s decision-making process, USA Today‘s Rex Huppke (6/22/25) assures readers that “of course” he hopes the bombing of Iran is “successful.”

Of the seven articles that criticized Trump’s actions, more were critical of Trump and his personality or disregard of procedure than were opposed to the illegal and aggressive actions of an empire. Three of these came from USA Today’s Rex Huppke. His first column (6/21/25) argued that “Trump may have just hurled America into war because he was mad nobody liked his recent military parade.”

His second piece (6/22/25) accused Trump of starting the war based on “vibes,” and rightly attacked the credibility of the administration, citing the numerous contradictory or false statements from US and Israeli officials. However, that column made it clear that Huppke hoped for a successful strike on Iran, even as he acknowledged it could end in “disaster”:

If Trump’s bombing of Iran proves successful—and I, of course, hope it does—it’ll be dumb luck. But if it leads to disaster, it’ll be exactly what anyone paying attention to these reckless hucksters predicted.

At the New York Times, former Biden Secretary of State Antony Blinken wrote a guest column (6/24/25) under the headline: “Trump’s Iran Strike Was a Mistake. I Hope It Succeeds.” Blinken’s primary issue with Trump’s attack was that Blinken deemed it ineffective; his secondary concern was that his own State Department achievements were being overlooked: “Mr. Trump’s actions were possible only because of the work of the Obama and Biden administrations.”

‘International authoritarianism’

It’s telling that a piece (New York Times, 6/23/25) arguing that Trump’s airstrikes were illegal has to go on to explain why that’s bad.

Of the 36 editorials and opinion pieces published by the top papers on the Iran bombing, only three (8%) explicitly opposed the bombing on legal or moral grounds. The New York Times and USA Today ran opinions grounded in legal arguments. USA Today also published human rights attorney Yasmin Z. Vafa on the human toll of this war on the citizens of Iran.

In her Times op-ed (6/23/25), Yale Law School professor Oona A. Hathaway points out that the attacks were not only unconstitutional, but in violation of international law, as Trump did not seek approval from either Congress or the UN Security Council. Hathaway was the sole opinion writer to describe Trump’s illegal actions with the same diction usually reserved for America’s enemies:

The seeming rise of authoritarianism at home is precipitating a kind of international authoritarianism, in which the American president can unleash the most powerful military the world has ever known on a whim.

USA Today‘s Chris Brennan (6/24/25) also emphasized Trump’s lack of congressional approval under the headline: “There’s a Legal Way to Go to War. Trump Flouting the Constitution Isn’t It.”

The same day in USA Today (6/24/25), Vafa—an Iranian refugee herself—brought a human angle to this conflict that is unfortunately hard to come by in the top papers’ pages. She wrote: “This kind of violence doesn’t happen in theory. It happens in living rooms. In kitchens. In schoolyards and in hospitals.”

Vafa not only raised the US’s history of destabilization in the Middle East, she also contextualized these kinds of attacks’ role in creating the refugee crises that right-wingers then use to create moral panics. “We are here because you were there,” she wrote.

The people speak 

The New York Times letters page (6/22/25) once again demonstrated that the paper is well to the right of its readership.

The New York Times (6/22/25) did publish a series of letters to the editor from their readers on “The Consequences of US Strikes in Iran.” Unlike the professional columnists, many of these readers were explicitly against the bombing. One letter began: “Once again our government has launched a war against a nation that has not attacked the United States.”

Another writer wrote:

Whether President Trump’s bombing of Iran’s nuclear facilities has postponed one danger or not, it has surely destroyed the effort to limit nuclear proliferation. The damage is incalculable.

Another wrote: “By crossing the line and attacking Iran, the United States should not be under the misconception that it has made a step toward peace.”

In fact, the only pro-bombing letter the Times published in the package was not written by an average citizen, but by Aviva Klompas, identified by the Times as “a former speechwriter for Israel.”

The Big Lie this time

Every big US aggression is sold by a Big Lie, told over and over again by policy makers and repeated ad nauseam in the press. US interventions in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Libya and Ukraine have all been sold to the public based on Big Lies.

This time for US newspaper columnists, the Big Lie is twofold: firstly, that Iran was rejecting negotiations in favor of building a bomb; secondly, that Iran wants to build a bomb to destroy Israel. These lies rely not only on ignorance, but also on a media apparatus that repeats them until they’re accepted as an uncontested premise for all discussion.

As FAIR (10/17/17, 6/23/25) has described in the past, these claims have no basis in fact. Iran, which has long been in favor of a nuclear weapons–free Middle East, has  attempted to negotiate a stable deal with the West for over a decade. Hindering this are Israel’s insistence on its undeclared nuclear arsenal, as well as both Trump and Biden’s rejection of the deal negotiated under Obama. Even if that weren’t the case, there’s no indication whatsoever that Iran, should it produce a nuclear bomb, would commit national suicide by attacking Israel with it.

These misrepresentations are made all the more egregious by the fact that there is a Mideastern country that has rejected the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, which occupies neighboring lands under military dictatorship, regularly attacks and violates treaties with its neighbors, has proven repeatedly to be a bad-faith negotiator, is currently committing an internationally recognized genocide, and does all this in the name of rights given to them by God. That country is Israel. If the columnists at leading US newspapers had any consistency, they would be calling for Trump to launch a surprise attack on Israel’s nuclear facilities and stockpiles.

But they don’t do this, because they either don’t know or don’t care about the relevant history. They’re all willing to uncritically manufacture consent for the US empire.

 

Janine Jackson interviewed the US Campaign for Palestinian Rights’ Iman Abid about the economy of genocide for the July 18, 2025, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin250718Abid.mp3

 

 

Al Jazeera (7/1/25)

Janine Jackson: Francesca Albanese, UN special rapporteur for the West Bank and Gaza, has called down all manner of official and unofficial grief for saying what any thinking person would know: that a mass extermination and displacement project, such as Israel is carrying out in Palestine, doesn’t fund itself.

As US citizens, we know we’re involved, that our “tax dollars” are used by politicians we may or may not have elected to do things that we don’t condone, much less endorse. But what US elite news media seem to hate above all things is the connecting of dots, the recognition that we are all related across borders and boundaries.

That the thing that brought US sanction was Albanese’s naming of defense companies providing weapons used by Israel’s military, makers of equipment used to bulldoze Palestinian homes, is telling. Watching corporate media try to maintain the notion that, yes, Citizens United said money is speech, and you can’t curtail that, but no, you absolutely cannot say that people might not want to support companies who are funding a genocide. Well, that’s telling about media as well.

Joining us now to talk about this is Iman Abid. She’s director of advocacy and organizing at the US Campaign for Palestinian Rights. She joins us now by phone. Welcome back to CounterSpin, Iman Abid.

Iman Abid: Thank you so much.

JJ: The statement in Albanese’s report, “While life in Gaza is being obliterated and the West Bank is under escalating assault, this report shows why Israel’s genocide continues: because it is lucrative for many”—I mean, it’s only in a weird world of elite media that that would be something that you can’t say. That should just be a point of information in our understanding, yes?

IA: At any point in time that we target or uplift the war crimes that these large corporations are partaking in, we’ve seen just how silenced or suppressed people are, and Francesca has now been a part of that. She’s brought a lot to light in this new document that has come out, information that many people, in various forms, have already uplifted, but has done a really incredible job at trying to both consolidate and make the information a lot more accessible. And so, since it is a lot more digestible to see, it’s easier to access. Weapons manufacturers and large corporations have been extremely disappointed in what the world is able to finally see.

Iman Abid: “Weapons manufacturers and large corporations have been extremely disappointed in what the world is able to finally see.” (Photo: Thomas Morrisey, Rochester Democrat & Chronicle.)

JJ: Right. Transparency is their enemy.

IA: Yeah, exactly.

JJ: And you would think that journalists—whatever they want to say about it—would support the idea that the public can understand exactly what’s happening. And yet that’s not the response that we’ve seen, from certainly the US officially, but also from journalists. I don’t feel that they are celebrating this report in a way that one would hope.

IA: Absolutely. I think that the reality is that much of the documentation, and the notes that are provided to us for review in this report, showcase not just what has been going on, and what corporations have been enacting for the last two years, throughout the duration of the genocide, but rather for the last few decades. This information has been available to the public, available to journalists and reporters, for a really long time, and for whatever reason, people generally choose to still avoid it.

Now, whether or not they themselves—certain news outlets have partnerships with some of these corporations, and they’re keeping them quiet for that purpose, or if there’s any other reason where maybe they as individuals are profiting off of these corporations themselves, we’ve seen just how silent people are when it comes to uplifting the harms of these corporations.

JJ: What do you hope or think might be the impact? Because it seems, obviously, Marco Rubio saying, “Ah! Shut up! Sanctions!” is telling that this information is important. What do you hope might be used? How do you think it might be used?

IA: My hope is that, especially for the American people, in any point in time, when this administration tries to silence someone, when they implement sanctions or any of that, I really encourage people to take a look at their work. And Francesca Albanese is an incredibly profound, extraordinary being who has spent their career building up and bringing awareness to the atrocities happening to the Palestinian people. This report is only one aspect of the work that she’s been so committed to.

NPR (7/10/25)

And I think that people like Marco Rubio, and other people within the Trump administration, don’t want you to see this, because they themselves are, again, establishing partnerships, or have established partnerships, with these corporations. And even some of the members of Congress, who have also uplifted and supported the sanctions on Francesca Albanese, some of them are war profiteers. They are the ones who are both building up the contracts with the federal government, or supporting the contracts with the federal government, to keep these corporations alive and thriving.

I think the report itself mentions on every single page just how Palestine is being used as this sort of military technology incubator. It’s an opportunity for these companies to use their work, and to see how it works on the Palestinian people. They’re almost using us as dispensable objects for their weapons. And I think that a lot of that is uplifted in this document.

And because of the atrocities that are being highlighted, and because of the direct connection to the United States Congress, the United States administration, it just shows an incredibly bad light on the US. And it also showcases just how harmful the partnerships and the military investment really is, across not only the US, but across the globe.

JJ: Elite media seem vigorously invested in policing lines between “us” and “them,” but it’s not working. Support for Palestinian human rights is growing, even as it’s being seriously criminalized. So where are you seeing daylight? Because I see a lot of people being extremely brave and using information, such as in this Albanese report, to say, “We’re armed. We’re armed with information, and we’re not going to buy the line that we’re being sold.”

IA: Absolutely. I think the movement has grown exponentially, and I think it’s simply because of the fact that we have watched this livestreamed genocide take place. And I think that when people see the level of death, when people see the level of atrocity, especially for those who’ve sat on social media platforms and watched the video footage and documentation of what’s been happening across Gaza, it’s become extremely difficult to deny what’s actually happening.

And people are moved. People are moved to speak up, people are moved to stand up, even against the faces of oppression, the Zionist forces that are trying to silence people, and they’re choosing to say that I don’t want to be on the wrong side of history, I want to take a stand on this, and not just a stand in the streets, but a strategic stand that allows me and my community to actually move towards getting this genocide to end, and for us to stop upholding these atrocities being committed against Palestinians.

Al Jazeera (6/26/24)

It’s been deeply fortunate that so many reports have come out, even just the last two years alone, not only of the weapons that have been used on Palestinians, but just what specific correlation there is between the US, the complicity of the US, and what’s been happening across Gaza and the rest of the West Bank, and even in parts of Jerusalem. And so people are starting to really see that direct line between themselves as US taxpayers, and where and what their money is being spent on, and just how it’s actually being used to abuse, assault and murder Palestinians. And people don’t want to be on that side. People don’t want to be complicit. I don’t think anyone wants to be complicit in war crimes being committed, and mass genocides being committed.

And so I think we’re starting to see just how people are really trying to take that next step, and acknowledge there are different avenues that people can take to really get things to stop. And whether it’s the targeting of weapons manufacturers like Caterpillar or Hyundai or Elbit, whoever is actually equipping Israel with the technology and the software and the technology that’s being used to destroy homes, whatever it may be, people are using these sorts of reports to help uplift the documentation that already exists, to bring attention to these corporations that we, as the United States, as US taxpayers, are investing in.

And they’re choosing to say that we don’t want this. We don’t want this to continue. And we, again, as taxpayers can do something about it.

JJ: And I’ll end on the media thing, that it calls out the media hypocrisy, because when folks were pouring out their Bud Light because they had a trans person in an ad, media were sort of celebrating: Oh, you’re using your consumer voice, you’re speaking with your dollars, right? And then out of the other side of their mouth, they want to say, Well, BDS is criminal. You’re not allowed to not shop at a store, or whatever, that supports genocide. So to me, it tells the tale on US media’s understanding of what a consumer gets to do with their voice.

IA: Absolutely. Again, yes, the exceptionalizing of Palestine, the exceptionalizing of the BDS movement, still exists, but we are seeing a shift. We are seeing people break beyond that, and actually start to question and start to ask themselves, why has the BDS movement actually existed for as long as it has?

Again, boycotting, divestment, sanctions is not an area that’s just particular to the Palestinian movement. It’s been used with South Africa, it’s been used in other parts of the world, because it is something that actually works. When we stop the transfer of dollars to these corporations, and to these entities like Israel that are actually upholding the genocide and the mass expulsion of Palestinians, we do start to see the shifting of it.

Mondoweiss (5/8/25)

And the Israeli economy, as a matter of fact, is actually beginning to decline, because of the level of education and the expansion of the Palestinian solidarity movement across the globe. And people are trying to be wiser about where they’re spending their dollars. And so I think that we’re not in the exact place we want to be just yet, but we are moving the needle towards where we want to go, and people are being wiser about where money is going.

And so while governments and elected officials are really still working hard to suppress any sort of BDS movement, whether it’s through the anti-BDS proposals, or if it’s through the sanctioning of certain individuals, the people themselves are starting to actually say: “Well, wait a minute. Why are you choosing to suppress us for engaging in this, when we know it’s the right thing to do?”

And members of Congress are starting to be a little more alert, and start to say, “Wait a minute, this isn’t actually a winning issue for me if I choose to engage in it. And it’s not necessarily something that I should really be pushing for.” Because people are becoming more attentive. And it’s allowing us, again, to move the needle where we really want to see us going.

JJ: We’ve been speaking with Iman Abid from the US Campaign for Palestinian Rights. They’re online at USCPR.org. Iman Abid, thank you so much for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

IA: Thank you so much.

 

 

 

 

https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin250725.mp3

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

 

PBS NewsHour (7/18/25)

This week on CounterSpin: The Trump administration is funding a genocide in Gaza—never mind headlines like July 24’s Washington Post: “Mass Starvation Stalks Gaza as Deaths From Hunger Rise.” (No, it’s actual human beings stalking Gaza, who could right now choose to act differently.)

The White House is deploying masked men to disappear people out of job sites and courtrooms, and offering them salaries orders of magnitude more than those paid teachers or nurses. They’re daylight-robbing hard-earned benefits from everyone, with the most vulnerable first; operating wild grifts for Trump himself; and shutting down any openings for dissent.

None of this, while we acknowledge individual regretters, has radically shaken the MAGA base. But now that group, we’re told, may be fracturing, around the Epstein files.

To tell this as a tale about two uniquely bad men, one of whom mysteriously died in prison while the other mysteriously became president, is a terrible disservice to a story of thinly veiled institutional, professional machinery employed in the systemic criminal victimization of women. But how can we expect elite news media to tell that story when they’re busy wasting ink on Trump denials as though they were something other than nonsense?

There’s a lot going on here; we’ll talk about just some of it with Thom Hartmann, radio host and author of, most recently, The Last American President: A Broken Man, a Corrupt Party and a World on the Brink.

https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin250725Hartmann.mp3

 

Ken Saro-Wiwa

Also on the show: Nigerian President Bola Tinubu has just announced a posthumous pardon for Nigerian writer, teacher and environmental activist Ken Saro-Wiwa, who was hanged in November 1995, along with eight of his comrades in the Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People. Their crime was nonviolent protest against the exploitation of their land and their people by oil industry giant Royal Dutch Shell. CounterSpin covered it at the time—and then in 2009, we caught up on still-ongoing efforts to bring some measure of accountability for those killings, and Shell’s unceasing human rights and environmental violations, with Han Shan, working with what was then called the ShellGuilty campaign, a coalitional effort from Oil Change International, Friends of the Earth and Platform/Remember Saro-Wiwa.

In light of this pardon, which is being acknowledged as necessary but insufficient, we’re going to hear that conversation with Han Shan again this week.

https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin250725Shan.mp3

 

FCC chair Brendan Carr (Bloomberg, 7/24/25) enthused about Skydance‘s promises: “They’ve committed to addressing bias issues. They’ve committed to embracing fact-based journalism.”

The media production company Skydance is acquiring Paramount Global. The deal may be thought largely to be an entertainment merger, as Paramount owns Comedy Central, MTV, BET, Nickelodeon, Showtime and the Paramount film studio. But Paramount owns broadcast network CBS and its news programming, which means that the deal has enormous implications for journalism—particularly given that it requires federal approval.

The coast certainly seems clear for the merger at this point: Paramount has settled what is widely regarded as a frivolous lawsuit from President Donald Trump for $16 million over a CBS 60 Minutes interview with Kamala Harris; it has also canceled its highly successful and long-running Late Show With Stephen Colbert, whose host was critical of the settlement. Meanwhile, Paramount‘s soon-to-be-owner has met with “anti-woke” crusader Bari Weiss about a potential partnership with CBS.

Trump has used his institutional power to attack media he dislikes such as ABC and CBS, as well as to defund liberal-leaning public broadcasters NPR and PBS (FAIR.org, 4/25/25; Variety, 7/18/25; USA Today, 7/18/25). Late last year, Disney settled a similarly ludicrous Trump lawsuit over ABC‘s election coverage (FAIR.org, 12/16/24).

Trump has also used his power to take control of government broadcaster Voice of America, once a Cold War propaganda tool for US power projection abroad, and fill it with content from One America News Network (AP, 5/7/25), a pro-Trump outlet FAIR founder Jeff Cohen once said “makes Fox News sound like Democracy Now!” (FAIR.org, 10/15/21).

The latest moves from CBS‘s owners mark the latest seismic shift to the right in the US media landscape.

Paramount kisses the ring

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) said “Paramount should be ashamed of putting its profits over independent journalism” (Vanity Fair, 7/2/25).

The lawsuit that Paramount settled to pave the way for the deal preposterously claimed that an interview with Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris on the CBS show 60 Minutes was deceptively edited to favor her over Trump (BBC, 7/2/25). Anyone who cares about journalism or media freedom would have rooted for Paramount and CBS to fight the lawsuit, but Paramount‘s leading stockholder, Shari Redstone, apparently saw the settlement as a small price to keep Trump’s Federal Communications Commission from standing in the way of the lucrative sale. (Trump claims that the combined company has also agreed to air $16 million more in PSAs, described as messages that will “support conservative causes supported by President Trump,” as part of the settlement, though Paramount denies such a side agreement exists—Variety, 7/4/25).

The settlement has been “broadly criticized as capitulation” by CBS staffers (Vanity Fair, 7/2/25). Reuters (7/2/25) reported that one 60 Minutes source said

newsroom staff expressed ‘widespread distress’ about the settlement and concerns about the future of the CBS News prime time news magazine and its hard-hitting brand of journalism.

A filing with the FCC (Deadline, 7/18/25) suggested that an upcoming shift in CBS’s news coverage was part of the deal to get the acquisition approved. It said that Skydance and FCC officials had “discussed Skydance’s commitment to unbiased journalism and its embrace of diverse viewpoints, principles that will ensure CBS’s editorial decision-making reflects the varied ideological perspectives of American viewers.”

Presumably those “varied ideological perspectives” will not include those offensive to Trump, since airing those resulted in Paramount paying a multi-million-dollar settlement. As I previously wrote (FAIR.org, 2/26/25), FCC chair Brendan Carr is a lieutenant in the MAGA movement, and wrote the FCC section for Project 2025, the right-wing policy roadmap for the second Trump administration. While vowing to reduce regulation, he has shown no qualms about using state power to impose ideological limits on broadcast news.

Paramount also promised to install an ombud who would investigate “any complaints of bias or other concerns” at CBS News, and to eliminate all diversity, equity and inclusion programs (Wrap, 7/23/25).

‘Sacrificing free speech to curry favor’

Mother Jones‘ Inae Oh (7/18/25) wrote that “the end of Colbert signals a dark new chapter in Trump’s authoritarian slide.”

As the deal approached, it became clear that CBS’s ability to operate as a fair news provider was slipping, as Bill Owens, the executive producer of 60 Minutes, “announced his resignation, saying he can no longer make independent journalism decisions for the program” (NPR, 4/23/25). With Colbert’s termination, it’s unclear whether any part of the new Skydance empire will escape ideological purification.

CBS‘s announcement that it would cancel the Late Show With Stephen Colbert has been read as a muzzling of a prominent critic, not just of Trump, but of the Paramount settlement. The Writers Guild of America East (7/18/25) spelled out the authoritarian moment plainly:

On July 15, during a regular show of the Late Show With Stephen Colbert, Colbert went on-air and called the settlement a “big fat bribe” in exchange for a favorable decision on the proposed merger between Paramount and Skydance, a charge currently under investigation in California.

Less than 48 hours later, on July 17, Paramount canceled the Late Show With Stephen Colbert, a show currently performing first in its timeslot, giving vague references to the program’s “financial performance” as the only explanation. For ten years, the show has been one of the most successful, beloved and profitable programs on CBS, entertaining an audience of millions on late night television, on streaming services and across social media.

Given Paramount’s recent capitulation to President Trump in the CBS News lawsuit, the Writers Guild of America has significant concerns that the Late Show’s cancellation is a bribe, sacrificing free speech to curry favor with the Trump administration as the company looks for merger approval.

In its first new episode in over a year, the Comedy Central flagship animated comedy South Park (7/23/25), often embraced by conservatives for its eagerness to offend liberals, attacked both Trump and the channel’s owner Paramount. In its raunchy style,  USA Today (7/24/25) reported, it “referenced everything from the company’s controversial settlement with the president to its shock decision to cancel the Late Show With Stephen Colbert.” Show creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone had previously commented on X (7/2/25), “This merger is a shitshow and it’s fucking up South Park.” It remains to be seen whether the thin-skinned Trump White House will hold up the acquisition in retaliation for the satire.

Trump’s ‘favorite tech company’

Skydance‘s David Ellison “is said to be interested in infusing [Bari] Weiss’s editorial perspective into CBS News” (CNN, 7/11/25). 

There are indications that more ideological restructuring at the network is on its way. CNN (7/11/25) reported that “Paramount’s owner-in-waiting, David Ellison, met with journalist entrepreneur Bari Weiss…about a possible tie-up between CBS News and her startup the Free Press.” The report added that “Ellison is said to be interested in infusing Weiss’s editorial perspective into CBS News.”

For those who are unfamiliar with Weiss, she is a former New York Times editor and writer who gained fame for attacking “wokeness” (Commentary, 11/21)—which for the right is any politics that seeks to address racial and gender inequalities—and her advocacy for Israel and against critics of its government (Intercept, 3/8/18).

While David Ellison donated to former President Joe Biden’s reelection efforts (CNBC, 4/16/24) and other Democratic campaigns, the political commitments of his father Larry Ellison may be more relevant. Larry is the co-founder of the software giant Oracle and, according to the Forbes 400 list, the fourth-richest person in the United States, behind Meta‘s Mark Zuckerberg, Amazon‘s Jeff Bezos and X‘s Elon Musk. As the New York Times (4/2/25) noted, Larry “is putting up most of the $8 billion bid by his son, David, to buy Paramount.”

The elder Ellison is well-known for his contributions to conservative causes (Vox, 2/12/20; Washington Post, 5/20/22). He gave $4 million to a super PAC supporting Marco Rubio’s presidential bid (Politico, 2/20/16), and $15 million to one backing Sen. Tim Scott (R–S.C.) (Politico, 2/19/22).

Slate (9/14/20) called Oracle the “Trump Administration’s Favorite Tech Company,” as evidenced by the fact that Trump picked Oracle to potentially “partner” with TikTok, giving the Chinese-owned social media company a reliable ideological watchdog in order to avoid a congressionally mandated ban (FAIR.org, 12/6/24).

Shared ‘Zionist values’

A Jerusalem Post article (7/31/24) “written in cooperation with SkyDance”—that is, an advertorial—touted the young executives at Skydance and Paramount as “connected to Israel and holding Zionist values.”

One thing the Ellisons agree on is wholehearted support for Zionism. In 2017, Larry Ellison gave $16.6 million to the Friends of the Israeli Defense Forces (Jewish Telegraphic Agency, 11/5/17). Two years ago, the Hollywood Reporter (10/13/23) reported that “Skydance Media, led by David Ellison, has committed $1 million to humanitarian relief efforts in Israel” in response to the October 7, 2023, Hamas attack.  It quoted the company:

Skydance stands with Israel, strongly condemns the attacks against its citizens, is donating support to the victims of this tragic act of terrorism, and prays for the safe release of innocents hostages.

Last year, the Jerusalem Post (7/31/24) ran a story “written in cooperation with SkyDance” that highlighted support for Israel by David Ellison and Redstone’s son, “Brandon Korff, heir to the Paramount empire.” The article quoted a “source familiar with the details” who described Ellison and Korff sharing “Zionist values” and noted that “both quietly donate quite a bit to the state of Israel and the IDF.”

Redstone herself has been an outspoken Zionist during her time at the head of Paramount; when CBS admonished host Tony Dokoupil for his hostile interview with author Ta-Nehisi Coates, in which Dokoupil suggested that Coates was an “extremist” on Palestine, Redstone publicly criticized network management (LA Times, 10/9/24).

Given the talks with Weiss and the Free Press, one might expect CBS coverage to skew even further to the right on the Middle East, as well as on the Trump’s administration effort to clamp down on critical speech against Israel’s genocide and its support from the US. While Weiss’s brand is all about free speech, she got her start in politics agitating for the censorship of professors with pro-Palestinian views (Jewish Currents, 7/23/20).

Featured image: The 60 Minutes interview (10/7/25) that CBS is paying Donald Trump $16 million for airing.

 

Sam Feder is the director of Heightened Scrutiny, a documentary that follows transgender ACLU lawyer Chase Strangio as he argues before the Supreme Court against Tennessee’s ban on gender-affirming care for trans youth. The film explores the crucial role centrist media played in driving legislation like Tennessee’s, and the broader cultural backlash against trans rights. FAIR senior analyst Julie Hollar, who appears in the film, interviewed Feder for FAIR.

 

Civil rights Lawyer Chase Strangio in Heightened Scrutiny: “It’s a playbook that will effectively take a misunderstood, maligned, small minority of people and place a larger population’s anxiety of a changing world onto them.”

Julie Hollar: You previously made a documentary, Disclosure (2020), about trans representation in film and television. You’ve said Heightened Scrutiny is something like a sequel to Disclosure. What drove you to make this film?

Sam Feder: Disclosure ends with a warning about the risks of increased visibility. I first met Chase when I interviewed him for Disclosure. He explained that while representation was important, it was crucial for trans people to be pushing for actual material redistribution, and to disrupt the systems that exclude most trans people, impacting their ability to survive. Without the deep, structural change Chase suggested, I worried that we were about to face a significant backlash to the media visibility we were witnessing at the time.

The backlash was even more drastic than I could have imagined. A year after Disclosure came out, hundreds of anti trans bills were being introduced. In just three years, from 2021–2024, we went from zero states banning gender-affirming care to 24 states. Now it’s up to 27 states.

I realized very quickly that anti-trans talking points that had once been confined to right-wing news outlets were now front-page stories in the mainstream media. My colleagues, who had always been strong allies, were parroting the mainstream media, questioning the legitimacy of trans healthcare. And they felt empowered by the coverage they were reading to speak with authority when debating trans rights, because the Paper of Record was saying it, and the Wall Street Journal, and the Atlantic, and on and on and on.

So I wanted to understand this shift, and I wanted to understand why reporters did not uphold the standards of journalism in coverage of trans people. Heightened Scrutiny examines the relationship between the media’s coverage of trans rights and the anti-trans legislation we have seen balloon in the backlash since 2021.

JH: Tell me more about the role of the media that you uncovered, and your focus on the New York Times.

Atlantic (7-8/18): “”Your Child Says She’s Trans. She Wants Hormones and Surgery. She’s 13.” (He’s 22, actually.)

SF: In the film we show that there was a clear shift starting in 2018, with the cover story in the Atlantic by Jesse Singal headlined “Your Child Says She’s Trans. She Wants Hormones and Surgery. She’s 13.”

We interviewed the cover model—he was 22 years old at the time of that article! Likewise, the rest of the story is full of misinformation and fearmongering. Fast forward to 2021, and misinformation about trans people is all over the Wall Street Journal, the Chicago Tribune, the LA Times, the Washington Post.

And people started to speak up and tell these outlets that they were publishing a lot of misinformation that was dangerous and harmful. And most outlets were willing to hear that criticism, and at least tried to do somewhat better—except the New York Times. They kind of dug in their heels and took it up a notch.

In a matter of six months or so, there were seven front-page stories questioning trans people’s right to healthcare in the New York Times. In early 2023, a group of Times contributors published an open letter about the anti-trans bias that had been steadily increasing. But the Times refused to acknowledge any wrongdoing, calling it legitimate and important journalism, and still to this day they promote the voices and ideas of well-known anti-trans thinkers, and perpetuate this anti-trans narrative.

And as Chase explains in the film, in the legal realm, this unprecedented thing was happening, which is that legal briefs were citing these articles. And that is incredibly uncommon with legal briefs about medical care; you usually see citations from scientists and medical experts, you don’t see them quoting articles from newspapers. And they were doing it because that was the only place they could draw on to support their anti-trans legislation.

And it was working; they were able to pass these bills because of the anti-trans media bias that was popping up everywhere. And the New York Times was central in that. There is a scene in the film where Fox News says look, even the New York Times is questioning this medical care, so it must be really bad for adolescents.

Julie Hollar in Heightened Scrutiny: “The news media really set the political agenda in many ways…. They establish what the national discourse is.”

JH: In the film, I talk briefly about FAIR’s 2023 study of New York Times trans coverage, which showed that over the course of a year, the paper devoted more front-page articles to framing trans people as some sort of threat to others’ rights—such as cisgender women and parents—than to the coordinated assault on trans people’s rights. FAIR just published an update to that study, which shows that the Times has gotten even worse in some ways than they were before, including fewer trans sources in front-page stories about trans issues, for instance, and including just as many sources peddling unchallenged anti-trans misinformation as trans sources. How are you as a filmmaker trying to hold the Times accountable? What do you hope audiences might do in response?

SF: When people watch the film, so many are surprised to learn about the trajectory from coverage to law, and how culpable the Times has been in spreading misinformation. This link between the articles and anti-trans bills is devastating; the film shows the direct connection from article to harm.

Just like Disclosure was a field study in representation that could be applied to any marginalized community, Heightened Scrutiny is a field study that can be applied to the ways in which the media has skewed the public’s perception of all marginalized people. At the end of the day, when anyone’s right to bodily autonomy is chipped away at, everyone’s rights are.

I think this is a way to show people an example of the harm. I also hope this film is a tool for supporting those who are on the ground fighting back against the harm—medical providers, lawyers, legislators, etc.

JH: The Times is getting worse, the Supreme Court isn’t saving us. In making the film, did you come across anything that gave you hope or inspiration?

SF: I learned from people I spoke with, in particular Lewis Wallace, who talks about how hope is a practice. Hope is something we have to work for relentlessly and rigorously.

I’m inspired by Mila, the 13-year-old trans girl in the film. She’s this brilliant person, empowered and unflappable in the face of immense struggle. Watching her fight gives me hope. And watching her family showing up to support her every step of the way teaches all of us what love can look like.

There’s still so much to protect. The Skrmetti decision is devastating, but queer and trans people know that we cannot rely on the law. Our ability to survive and thrive does not begin or end with the law. We know how to take care of each other. That also gives me hope.

You know, when Zohran Mamdani won the New York City mayoral primary, I also felt real hope, witnessing New Yorkers come together and do something that seemed so impossible. I hope people will rally around trans civil rights the same way.

JH: And media did their best to push misinformation in that case, too.

SF: Yes, the Times included. And seeing people be skeptical of the media, ignore the misinformation, take action together, and do what the media try to tell us is impossible or scary or “too woke”—we need to keep doing that, and giving each other hope.

Filmmaker Sam Feder: “So many people were misled into thinking there is a legitimate debate about…whether trans people’s basic rights should be upheld, and it’s because of what they read or see in mainstream media.”

JH: What do you want people to walk away from your film with?

SF: I want people to see that the SCOTUS case is grounded in popular culture, in mainstream media and social media discourse. So many people were misled into thinking there is a legitimate debate about whether the risks of gender-affirming care outweighed the need for it, and whether trans people’s basic rights should be upheld, and it’s because of what they read or see in mainstream media. The legislation directly responds to the media climate.

Our existence is not a debate. As Jude [Ellison S. Doyle] says in the film: “Trans people are presented as one side of a debate on our lives. I hold the opinion that I exist, and you hold the opinion that I don’t.”

The outcome of this case is going to impact the constitutional rights of all people living in America. That’s lost on many people, but this is going to affect everyone’s access to privacy with their doctors.

JH: And that’s something that just wasn’t highlighted in most of the media coverage of the case, so that most people are not aware of it, based on the news reports.

SF: I absolutely think you’re right about that. There is still a lot we can protect. The fight is not over.

Heightened Scrutiny is screening in New York City at DCTV, July 18–24; in Los Angeles at Laemmle Theatres, July 26–27 and 29; and in San Francisco at the Roxie Theater, July 31 and August 2.

 

 

Janine Jackson interviewed media scholar Victor Pickard about the Paramount settlement for the July 18, 2025, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin250718Pickard.mp3

 

Washington Monthly (6/2/25)

Janine Jackson: Faced with a groundless lawsuit claiming that an interview with Kamala Harris amounted to election interference in favor of Democrats, CBS News’ parent company, Paramount, could have struck a symbolic blow for press freedom by saying, “No,” pointing to any number of legal arguments, starting with the First (for a reason) Amendment.

But Paramount isn’t a journalistic institution. It’s a business with media holdings, and controlling shareholder Shari Redstone was in the middle of doing business, trying to sell the corporation to another Hollywood studio, a move that, perhaps quaintly, requires government approval. That now means approval of this government.

And so here we are, with a recent $16 million deal, which is being widely denounced as an outright bribe, and a cold wind blowing through every newsroom.

And yet here we are. The Paramount settlement, says Victor Pickard, is, yes, a stunning display of bribery, greed and cowardice. But we need to understand, it’s also a symptom of a deep structural rot in our media today, a system in which profit trumps democracy at every turn.

Victor Pickard is a professor of media policy and political economy at the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School for Communication, where he co-directs the Media Inequality and Change Center. He’s the author, most recently, of Democracy Without Journalism?: Confronting the Misinformation Society from Oxford University Press. He joins us now by phone. Welcome back to CounterSpin, Victor Pickard.

Victor Pickard: It’s great to be back on the show, Janine.

JJ: Well, I hear that Paramount‘s market value has dropped since Shari Redstone threw press independence on the fire to warm shareholders’ hands. It’s almost as if folks thought it wasn’t a valuable journalistic institution.

Forbes (4/7/20)

I want to launch you into the bigger picture of which this is emblematic, but I first want to insert: Shari Redstone inherited Paramount from her father, Sumner Redstone, who, while some of us were working to show there was a conflict, declared it openly.

In 2004, then-head of CBS and Viacom Sumner Redstone stated at a corporate leader confab that he didn’t want to denigrate then–Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry, but

from a Viacom standpoint, the election of a Republican administration is a better deal, because the Republican administration has stood for many things we believe in, deregulation and so on. The Democrats are not bad people, but from a Viacom standpoint, we believe the election of a Republican administration is better for our company.

And, later, CBS head Les Moonves—CounterSpin listeners will have heard me say many times—declared laughingly, “Donald Trump is bad for America, but he’s good for CBS, so let’s do it.”

So the structural conflict you’re describing, it’s not a theory. It’s not the stuff of smoke-filled rooms. It’s out there for everyone to see, every day in every way. So the questions have to do with, once we diagnose this problem, what do we do about it?

The Nation (1/30/17)

VP: Thank you for opening up with that softball question. I mean, that is the main problem before us, and everything you just said leading up to this question really lays out that this is a systemic problem that we’re facing, and it requires a systemic fix. It’s not just a case of a few bad apples, or a handful of bad corporations and perhaps a bad journalist, even, but it really is a systemic structural problem. And so we really need to move our frame of analysis from just condemning the latest media malfeasance to really condemning the entire hypercommercialized media system in which we are all immersed, and so clearly serves only commercial values and not democratic values.

So the first step, of course, would be to decommercialize our media, much easier said than done, but that’s something we need to place on our horizon. And not only that, we also need to radically democratize our media, from root to branch, and that means bringing it back down to the local level, making sure that our media are owned and controlled by the public. Even our public media, our so-called public media, aren’t actually owned by the people.

So this is something that we need to work towards. It won’t happen tomorrow, but it’s something we need to start thinking about now.

JJ: I love the idea of a long-term and a short-term plan, and eyes on the prize. So let’s go back to that. It’s not that we’re going to change things legislatively or politically tomorrow, but there are things on the ground locally. There are models we can build on, yeah?

The Nation (4/15/25)

VP: That’s absolutely true. There’s a number of models that exist today, that have existed in our history and that exist around the world, and we really should be looking at some of those to expand our current imagination about what’s possible in the future. Obviously, we have some great independent local media, and those outlets, those institutions, we should be supporting in any way that we can, through donations, subscriptions, whatever we can, to help them. They’re all struggling, like all local media are right now.

We also, even though I made a sort of snarky comment about our public media a moment ago, I think we do need to look to, as I say, save our public media so that we can change it. As we know, the meager funds that we allocate to public media are currently on the chopping block. It comes out to about a $1.58 per person per year in this country, which is literally off the chart compared to most democratic countries around the world. So we need to look at how we can salvage that, but also, again, expand on it, and build, restructure our public media, so that it’s not just public in name but actually publicly owned.

There are other things that we could be doing, but we just have to start with recognizing that the current commercial system is failing democracy, and will always fail democracy.

JJ: When you talk about public media, and this is a thing, of course, folks are being encouraged to think about it now as “ideological” institutions. First of all, and you’ve said it, but they don’t get a lot of government support to begin with.

Neiman Reports (1/24/22): The US is virtually off the chart when it comes to its ratio of GDP to spending on public media.

But at the same time, progressives, we’ve had plenty of complaints about public broadcasting as it exists in this country. It had a beautiful ideal. It had a beautiful beginning. It hasn’t fulfilled that role.

We have complaints about it, but the complaints that we’re now hearing don’t have anything to do with the complaints that we have about it. So the idea of saving public media might land weird to some CounterSpin listeners, but there’s a reason that we need to keep that venue open.

VP: Absolutely. I mean, it is an ideal, just like democracy itself is an ideal, something that we have yet to actually achieve, but it’s something we can’t give up on just because the current iteration of this model that we have in the US, which is a kind of strange one, again, compared to other public media models around the world, it’s actually a misnomer. It’s mostly supported by private capital.

But if we were to actually fund it in accordance with global norms, we could have a very robust public media system that was not dependent on corporate sponsorships, that was not catering to higher socioeconomic groups, that, again, could actually spend more time engaging with and devoting programming for local communities.

So this is something that’s not inevitable. Like our entire media system, there was nothing inevitable with how we designed it. We need to understand the political economic structures that produce the kind of media that we’re constantly critiquing in order to change it, to create an entirely different kind of media system that’s driven by a different and democratic logic.

JJ: Let me just draw you out on that. We spoke last year, and I would refer interested people to that conversation, about separating capitalism and journalism, and talking about different ways of financing media in the service of the public.

And we understand complaints about “state media.” We hear all of that, and any kind of funding structure should be transparent, and we should talk about it.

But I want to ask you, finally, there are creative policy responses going on, and it’s not about kicking the final answers down the field; it’s really just about making a road while we walk it, and making examples of things, so that we can see that, yeah, they work, and they can move us towards a bigger vision.

CounterSpin (5/6/22)

VP: Absolutely. And as you already suggested, state media and public media are not the same thing. That we publicly subsidize media doesn’t mean it immediately has to become a mouthpiece for the state or the government.

And, indeed, government is always involved in our media. It’s a question of how it should be involved, whether it’s to serve corporate interests or public interests.

I think we can look to what’s happening at the state level, for example, in New Jersey, they’ve long had an Information Consortium network that’s focused on subsidizing various local journalistic initiatives. And it’s a proof of concept of how the state can make these public investments towards publicly accountable media. And we’re starting to see that in many states across the country.

A lot of experiments, some will survive, some won’t. The important thing is that we need to create these non-market means of support for the media that we need. I think that ideal of separating journalism and capitalism, which was always a match made in Hell, we need to find a way to do that, again, to be on our political horizon for the future.

Victor Pickard: “Much of what we’re talking about is really trying to figure out the structures that would allow journalists to be journalists.”

JJ: Well, I said that was my last question, but I want to ask you another one, because I think a mistake that folks make about FAIR, and possibly about you, is that we’re anti-journalism per se. But we are emphatically pro–good journalism that’s not public relations for power. It’s because we believe in the power of journalism that we are so concerned about these structural constraints.

VP: Exactly. I couldn’t agree more with that statement. And I think much of what we’re talking about is really trying to figure out the structures that would allow journalists to be journalists. Most journalists don’t go into the profession, they don’t follow the craft, to become rich, or to become mouthpieces of the already powerful. I think it’s generally a noble calling, and we just need to create the institutions and the structures that can allow them to be the great journalist they want to be.

JJ: All right, then. Victor Pickard is professor of media policy and political economy at the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School for Communication. He co-directs the Media Inequality and Change Center, and his most recent book is called Democracy Without Journalism?. Victor Pickard, thank you so much for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

VP: Thanks so much for having me, Janine.

 

ABC (7/15/25) reports on the death toll of Texas’ fossil fuel–fueled floods.

In Texas, at least 134 people are dead, including 36 children, and a hundred are missing after a devastating flash flood swept through the central part of the state on July 4. A late June/early July heatwave in Europe claimed 2,300 lives across the continent. These events, of the kind made more extreme and frequent by climate change (ABC, 7/7/25; New York Times, 7/9/25), occur as EU leaders roll back climate policy and the Trump administration guts climate protections, staying true to the slogan of “Drill, baby, drill!”

Despite this dire backsliding on climate policy, with consequences that are clear as day, it’s business as usual in the realm of business news. Recent pieces in the widely read business publications Bloomberg, the Wall Street Journal and the business section of Reuters misleadingly suggested the fossil fuel industry’s profits and losses happen in a vacuum.

A clear consensus

Global leaders ignoring the climate crisis clearly aren’t making its tragic effects go away. The scientific consensus has been unmistakable for years: Fossil fuels are the main driver of climate change. In order to avoid surpassing the Paris Agreement’s 1.5°C limit, beyond which the most devastating impacts from global heating will be felt, we need to phase out fossil fuels—and fast (Union of Concerned Scientists, 1/21/21).

Many journalists have expressed this urgency while covering extreme weather and other impacts, making the connection to human-caused climate change and fossil fuel emissions (FAIR.org, 5/17/24). While these in-depth stories serve as clear explainers in outlets’ science and environment sections, the connection is still being ignored when business is discussed.

If not for the grotesque profits of fossil fuel companies—which knew about their industry’s environmental impact since the 1970s—resistance to a clean energy transition would not exist.

Industry coverage

Reuters (7/8/25) reported that “the US will produce less oil in 2025 than previously expected as declining oil prices have prompted producers to slow activity this year”—with no acknowledgment of the climate impact of this slowdown.

In early July, Exxon and Shell announced lower second-quarter profits from weaker oil and gas trading. Coverage in Bloomberg (7/7/25), the Wall Street Journal (7/7/25) and Reuters (7/7/25) discussed these announcements as indicative of how the rest of the fossil fuel industry will fare in Q2. Stories attributed these dips to Trump’s tariffs, Middle East tensions, excess supply and uncertain demand. Oil prices creeping up over the past two weeks were due to Houthi attacks in the Red Sea, projected lower US oil production and Trump tariffs, Reuters (7/8/25) reported.

Meanwhile, reports on renewable energy stocks dipping after the passing of Trump’s so-called “Big Beautiful Bill” also failed to mention the consequences of this backslide (Reuters, 7/7/25; Bloomberg, 7/8/25): If we keep our carbon emissions at current rates, we are poised to hit the 1.5°C threshold before 2030, leading to more deadly extreme weather events worldwide (Health Policy Watch, 5/6/24).

Discussing Chevron’s efforts to cut costs, Bloomberg (7/9/25) mentioned low oil prices and an “uncertain outlook for fossil fuels.” A passing mention of an “uncertain outlook” was the closest any of these pieces gets to hinting at the relevant need to phase out fossil fuels and invest in renewables, regardless of geopolitical events and market trends.

Increased demand

The Wall Street Journal (7/10/25) euphemized Trump’s wholesale attack on renewable energy as “a rising tide of pushback and scrutiny over climate-transition plans.”

The Wall Street Journal (7/10/25) reported “Oil Age Is Far From Over, OPEC Says,” citing increased energy needs globally as a reason fossil fuels will continue to be extracted. Oil correspondent Giulia Petroni wrote:

Meanwhile, OPEC also said energy policies across major economies are shifting as countries grapple with a growing array of challenges. While ambitious policy goals remain in place, a rising tide of pushback and scrutiny over climate-transition plans is emerging, particularly in the US and other advanced economies, according to the cartel.

Petroni did not cite any scientists or climate activists to push back against OPEC’s claims, let alone any of the litany of studies, data and reports that warn that if we want life on earth as we know it to continue, we simply cannot keep drilling for more oil. The International Institute for Sustainable Development (9/25/24) explained:

Peer-reviewed science shows there is no room for new coal, oil and gas development under the 1.5°C global warming limit agreed in Paris. In 1.5°C-aligned scenarios, coal production declines by 95% by 2050, and oil and gas production by at least 65%.

Another Journal piece (7/9/25) discussed a decrease in diesel supply, which could increase transport and heating costs next winter. “Lack of refining capacity growth is also a problem in the US, where the green energy movement has turned some refiners away from making diesel, said Flynn of the Price Futures Group,”  Anthony Harrup reported—as if it’s a “problem” that green activists have succeeded in steering producers away from a climate-wrecking fuel. (No experts on renewable alternatives were cited.)

The argument that renewable energy sources can’t power the world is also not supported. According to the UN, renewables have the potential to meet 65% of the world’s energy demands by 2030 and 90% by 2050. And contrary to fossil fuel propaganda parroted by corporate media, renewable energy sources are already the cheapest power option in the majority of the world.

The AI boom

Bloomberg‘s report (7/4/25) worried that ending tax credits for renewable energy would fail to “quench the thirst of data centers that power artificial intelligence”—not that it would accelerate the climate catastrophe. 

Reports about AI’s profligate energy usage from Reuters and Bloomberg also largely left out discussions about its climate impact. Reuters (7/9/25) did a story on the crisis facing the largest power grid in the country due to AI demand, as chatbots “consume power faster than new plants can be built.” The piece reported Trump ordering two oil and natural gas power plants in Pennsylvania to continue operating through the summer, despite their scheduled retirement in May, without mentioning the effect on climate.

Bloomberg (7/4/25) reported on Trump’s tax package curbing renewables even as AI’s need for power increases. The piece discussed the economic implications of the policy, but left out the dire environmental consequences.

Another Bloomberg piece (7/7/25) about AI’s utility needs did briefly make the climate connection. Reporter Josh Saul alluded at the end of the article to the arguments of “critics,” who warn these data centers can “hurt climate efforts by extending the lives of carbon-emitting coal and gas plants.” But he did not quote or cite specific groups, scientists or activists.

Ironic omissions

“Europe’s fleet of coal and gas plants could come to the rescue,” Bloomberg (7/7/25) reported. “The likely comeback for the region’s legacy fossil-fuel plants shows just how important they are.”

More puzzling reporting discussed European countries needing to fill energy gaps with fossil fuels during June and July’s deadly heatwaves.

“Fossil Fuels Set to Fill Europe’s Power Gap as Wind Plunges” (Bloomberg, 7/7/25) quoted an energy strategist from Rabobank: “The longer the wind lull continues amid the scorching heat, the longer fossil fuels will have to fill the evening demand gap in power markets.”

“Europe is steadily refilling storage sites that ended last winter severely depleted after a colder-than-usual heating season triggered hefty withdrawals,” another Bloomberg piece (7/7/25) stated. “Still, the region remains vulnerable to sudden shifts in supply or demand—especially as hot weather drives up energy use for cooling.”

“Risks remain as most of July is expected to be hotter than usual across Europe, possibly boosting gas consumption to meet demand for cooling,” said another (Bloomberg, 7/10/25).

This “hotter than usual” weather in Europe has claimed thousands of lives, with research suggesting 1,500 of the 2,300 estimated heat deaths could be connected to climate change, which, as we know, is caused by the burning of fossil fuels (New York Times, 7/9/25). But this clear connection and ironic chicken-and-egg scenario is not explained in any of these articles.

The Wall Street Journal (7/5/25) refers to the rolling back of “Biden’s climate law”—but never explains what energy and climate have to do with each other.

The Wall Street Journal (7/5/25) covered Trump’s rollback of President Joe Biden’s climate law, which offered subsidies for wind and solar power, electric vehicles and other green projects, in a piece headlined “The Moment the Clean-Energy Boom Ran Into ‘Drill, Baby, Drill.’”

The piece quoted Tracy Stone-Manning, president of the Wilderness Society and director of the Bureau of Land Management under Biden; Reagan Farr, chief executive of solar developer Silicon Ranch; and Cierra Pearl, a young Maine resident who recently lost her job building solar arrays. These sources decried Trump’s sabotage of the green energy transition, but none of them were cited discussing broader climate impacts.

“The clashing visions have left many developers and workers around the country in a lurch,” Journal oil reporter David Uberti wrote. Uberti made sure to quote a statement by Tom Pyle, president of the pro-fossil fuel American Energy Alliance: “If repealing these subsidies will ‘kill’ their industry, then maybe it shouldn’t exist in the first place.” (The $20 billion the fossil fuel industry receives annually in direct US government subsidies was not discussed.)

The impacts Trump’s anti–green energy policies will have on fossil fuel workers are certainly relevant, and it makes sense that business news articles would center broadly defined economic implications. But it is a glaring omission to discuss EVs, renewable energy and the possibility of oil drilling on public lands without any mention of environmental impacts and our all-but-guaranteed surpassing of the Paris Agreement threshold if we continue along this path.

Siloing the connection

Bloomberg (7/10/15) puts a story about how climate change is killing Europeans in its special “Green” section.

These outlets have no shortage of resources to report on climate change—and the culpability of the fossil fuel industry for its ramifications. Some are already doing it in other sections of the paper.

“We need to start acting against climate change and this means, first, trying to reduce the heat in cities,” a Bloomberg piece (7/10/15) about Europe’s heatwave said, quoting environmental epidemiologist Pierre Masselot. “But at the end of the day, all these measures won’t probably be as efficient as just reducing climate change altogether, and so reducing our greenhouse gas emissions.” This article appeared in the site’s “Green” section.

In another  piece (7/7/25) regarding AI’s energy demands in the “Green” section, the outlet also makes the connection to climate change. Bloomberg quoted a statement from environmental law organization Earthjustice:

Coal, gas and oil fired power plants spew millions of pounds of health-harming and climate-warming pollution into the air each year, and cost consumers millions of dollars more than cleaner energy sources.

While thorough climate reporting and mentions of the fossil fuel industry’s responsibility for global heating are difficult to find in the Rupert Murdoch-owned Wall Street Journal, its “Sustainable Business” section (6/30/25) recently covered how companies are reporting fewer details about how climate change and extreme weather are impacting their business.

In its “Sustainability” section, Reuters (7/1/25) discussed the EU heatwave’s links to climate change and fossil fuel emissions. “Scientists say greenhouse gas emissions from burning fossil fuels are a cause of climate change, with deforestation and industrial practices being other contributing factors,” Clotaire Achi, Emma Pinedo and Alvise Armellini wrote. “Last year was the planet’s hottest on record.”

The ‘silent majority’

Recent studies have revealed that between 80–89% of people worldwide are concerned about climate change and want their governments to do more to address it. But this vast majority of global citizens is ignored by reporting that treats the relentless extraction of fossil fuels as a source of profit rather than an existential threat. The climate journalism resource group Covering Climate Now, of which FAIR is a partner, refers to these people as the “silent majority.” Public support is widespread, but public discourse is lagging behind.

Major publications should not relegate the causes of climate change to their science and environmental sections. They need to be front and center in pieces that focus on the industry responsible for driving it, profiting from it and lying to the public about it for decades.

This story is part of the 89 Percent Project, an initiative of the global journalism collaboration Covering Climate Now.

 

Janine Jackson interviewed Detention Watch Network’s Silky Shah about mass deportation for the July 11, 2025, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

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

 

FAIR.org (7/9/25)

Janine Jackson: As is being reported, including by Belén Fernández for FAIR.org, among the myriad horrors of Trump’s budget bill—though not his alone; everyone who voted for it owns it—is the otherworldly amount of money, $175 billion, slated to fund mass deportation. That exceeds the military budget of every country in the world but the US and China. And some $30 billion is to go to ICE, the masked goons that are descending on swap meets and workplaces to carry out what many are calling brazen midday kidnappings.

We knew that this White House would be horrible for Black and brown people, and for immigrants especially, and yet we can still be shocked at how bad and how fast things are happening. Despair might be understandable, but it’s not particularly useful. So what do we do? What can we do?

Joining us now is Silky Shah, executive director at Detention Watch Network. She joins us now by phone. Welcome back to CounterSpin, Silky Shah.

Silky Shah: Thank you for having me.

CounterSpin (1/24/25)

JJ: We see the narrative shifting. “Hey, he said it was just going to be violent criminals, or criminals, or people whose crime is administrative, but now, this is getting weird.” What’s happening now, the rounding up of anyone brown, basically, including people who are actively engaged in the legal processes of securing citizenship—we can be outraged, but I’m less sure about surprised, just because there was no “decent” way to do what Trump telegraphed he wanted to do.

At the same time, though, I don’t know that anyone really expected masked men spilling out of vans to snatch up children off the street. So, just first of all, did you even imagine the particular situation we’re seeing right now? You explained back in January how the apparatus were set up, but is this surprising, even at your level of understanding?

SS: I think what’s so shocking about this moment is that the scale of what has happened before is becoming astronomical. So, as you mentioned, $175 billion for immigration enforcement, $30 billion for ICE agents in particular, $35 billion for immigration detention. These are just wild numbers, and I think that is really what is so shocking.

Public Books (3/20/25)

I do think—we’re speaking here on CounterSpin—one of the biggest challenges of the last 20, 30 years of immigration enforcement, and how it’s been portrayed, is that there is a constant framing of immigration as a public safety issue, immigration as a national security issue, which is really not true. Mostly immigration is about labor, it’s about family relationships, it’s about seeking refuge.

And I think what’s so frustrating is that, actually, for many, many years of having this narrative of “some immigrants are deserving and some immigrants aren’t,” the “good immigrant versus the bad immigrant,” what ends up happening is where we’re at now, which it’s like all immigrants are perceived as a problem. And there’s no question that there’s an underlying racism and xenophobia and classism and all the other things at play here.

I think what’s so important for us to understand now, when we’re talking about the way ICE is operating, is that it’s been enabled by that framework—that when you reinforce this idea that some people are deserving, then you kind of expect everybody to be in that category. And in reality, the way the system worked before, is that people were being funneled through the criminal legal system. And this really skyrocketed the number of people who are in deportation proceedings, especially under the Obama administration. So this framework of “we are going to target people who are criminals,” it’s a distraction; the goal is to scapegoat immigrants, and all immigrants, and ignore the crisis of mass incarceration, which ICE is inherently a part of.

JJ: Where is the law in all of this? Is it that there are laws that exist, but aren’t being enforced? Is it that the law has changed, such that what we’re seeing is terrible, but lamentably legal? Do laws need to be changed? I think a lot of folks see masked men spilling out of vans and snatching kids and think, “That can’t be legal.” But is it?

Silky Shah: “They’re actually using immigration enforcement as a pretense to go after people who don’t agree with their ideas.”

SS: Well, I think there are some aspects of this that have been baked into the law for 30 years now, and some aspects that are new. And so I think it’s important to understand that. When you think about it, this initial framing of, “Oh, people are being disappeared and kidnapped,” came when a lot of students who had protested or expressed solidarity with Palestine were being targeted by ICE, many of whom had not had contact with the criminal legal system, many of whom had legal status in some form, including Green Cards and visas.

In that context, 30 years ago, when they passed the 1996 immigration laws, it actually started to expand the category of people who didn’t get due process, who didn’t have the right to due process; that included newly arriving immigrants, and also people who were legal permit residents, or had visas but had some crime, some conviction, that meant that they no longer had a right to make their case before a judge, and were required to be detained, required to be deported.

And so all of that stuff has been happening for decades now, and there are many aspects of what happened. Being separated from your family, even if you have a pregnant wife, all those things are quite normal. And also not having a warrant; I mean, ICE goes after immigrants all the time without a warrant. And a lot of our work has been to help people know their rights, know what is needed. But I think the thing that’s scary is that they’re actually using immigration enforcement as a pretense to go after people who don’t agree with their ideas, people who might be showing support for Palestine, or merely because they are Black and brown, and are an easy scapegoat for this administration.

So I think there are things that are happening outside of the scope of the law, and I think the test cases here are those students who were detained, and also the case of the many people who were sent to a mega-prison in El Salvador. I think those are instances where you’re just like, “Wow, that is definitely outside of law, and they’re operating in these ways that are really concerning.” But they’re also using these as strategies to change the law, which is what we saw recently with the men who are being deported to South Sudan, were stuck in Djibouti for many weeks, and now officially are in South Sudan. And the Supreme Court deeming that OK.

JJ: It’s bizarre.

You mentioned last time how much local- and state-level buy-in is required for this whole plan to work. Yes, there’s ICE. Yes, there is the Trump administration, but they do rely on state and local law enforcement, and other officials, to make this play out. Is that still a place to look for resistance, then?

SS: Absolutely. And I think it’s especially important now that we double down on those efforts because, yes, ICE is going to have $45 billion more over the next four years to build more detention centers, and our goal is to block that in every way, and make sure that isn’t permanent. And a lot of our strategy is getting local officials, state officials, to do that work, to say, “No, we don’t want a new ICE detention center in our community.” Once ICE detention exists in the community, people are much more likely to be targeted for deportation. Detention exists to facilitate deportation.

So in places like Illinois and Oregon, for instance, there are no detention centers. And that actually helps protect communities that much more.

NPR (6/6/25)

And I think, unfortunately, a lot of Democratic governors are responding in ways that are not ideal. I think in places like California and Washington State and other places, there needs to be a lot of work to say no, we have to double down on these policies that have protected immigrant communities, and expand them, and make sure that those transfers to ICE aren’t happening, so that we can limit ICE’s reach as much as possible. It’s still the most effective way to prevent them from getting the scale of deportations they want. The easiest way for them to do this is through these ICE/police collaborations, and stopping that is essential.

But also, in places like Florida, where Ron DeSantis is doing everything possible to work with ICE, and building things like this Everglades detention camp, and having agreements with ICE at every county jail. There’s been numerous deaths, actually, in Florida already, of people who have been in ICE custody. And so it really shows you the harm that that sort of relationship between state and local law enforcement does to make ICE even that much stronger. So I think there is this constant attention on ICE, but we have to understand that ICE operates within a broader apparatus around criminalization and the deportation machine, that many, many law enforcement agencies, including sheriffs, are central to.

JJ: And just to add to that: It’s about money, as you’ve explained. It comes back to money. Prisons—we can call them “detention centers”—bring money to a locality. And so that is part of the unseen or underexplored aspect of this, is that when you build a holding cell, then you’re going to put people in it. And that is part of what explains what’s happening.

SS: Absolutely. I think that this is so about the political economy, and some people have referred to this new MAGA murder bill as a jobs program. If you have this much more money for ICE, this much more money for detention, that means more jobs in these communities. And this is what we saw for years and years during the prison boom, is that many rural communities that were struggling financially were seeing prison as a recession-safe economy, like an ability to bring in jobs.

And especially when it comes to the relationship between sheriffs and ICE, there’s a symbiosis there between the federal government and local counties, that local counties are really depending on its revenue. I think one of our biggest challenges when we’re trying to work to end a detention contract is that fear of losing jobs, and that fear of losing that revenue.

Detention Watch Network (2021)

JJ: Let me just ask you, feeding off of that, to talk about #CommunitiesNotCages. What is the vision there? What are you talking about there, and where can folks see another way forward?

SS: Yeah, we launched a #CommunitiesNotCages campaign many years ago, under Trump’s first term, and we’re actually about to relaunch, because the amount of money that’s going to the system, the scale of what’s going to happen, I think we need to bring a lot more people in.

But a lot of it was actually responding to local organizing against detention. So we were seeing, in places like Alabama and Georgia and Arizona and elsewhere, that people were calling attention to the existing detention system and the harm that it was doing, the number of deaths that were happening, people hunger-striking in facilities. We were trying to really do work to get resources to them, make sure people are strategizing together.

And then in places like the Midwest, for years, so many groups were doing work to stop a new detention center from coming in. ICE wanted to have one large detention center in Illinois or Indiana or elsewhere. And they tried to build it in nine or ten different sites, and at every site they were able to organize with local community, or work with the state legislature, to stop detention expansion.

And so what we did was bring a lot of these communities together, the people who are organizing this campaign, thinking about state legislation, thinking about strategies with local counties or city councils, to learn from each other, and figure out, “OK, what can we do?”

Because one of the things we discovered, and we did some research on this, is that when there’s a detention center in your community, so if you have, say, 50 beds for detention, somebody’s two times more likely to be targeted for deportation. If you have 800 beds, somebody’s six times more likely to be targeted for deportation. And so that ability to cut off the detention capacity actually prevented increased deportation.

New Yorker (5/7/21)

So we really see #CommunitiesNotCages as a part of the strategy to end this mass deportation agenda, and also really connect to that broader effort against the prison industrial complex and against the crisis of mass incarceration, which does so much harm and are really, I think Mariame Kaba has called them “death-making institutions.” I mean, we’re seeing that numerous deaths have just happened in the last few weeks.

And so we’re really concerned about the conditions right now. I’m the first person to say Trump is building on what’s a bipartisan agenda, for decades now, against immigrants. But the scale of what’s happening, and how abysmal these facilities are becoming, are even shocking to me, as somebody who’s been doing this work for 20 years.

So I think this is the time where we can’t give in. Yes, they got this $45 billion, but actually, we have a lot of ability to stop them from implementing their plans, and we really need to gear up and fight as much as we can.

JJ: Well, that sounds very much like an end, and yet I am going to push for one final question, because we need a positive vision. What we’re seeing, what’s passing for a positive vision on immigration right now is, “But he makes my tacos! He waters my lawn! Don’t come for him!” And it makes immigration feel like noblesse oblige. It’s very nice of “us” that we let “them” live here.

And we can debunk all day: Immigrants do pay taxes, they aren’t stealing jobs. It’s also mean and small as a vision. And I just feel that there’s a positive, forward-looking vision that we could be talking about.

CounterSpin (6/25/21)

SS: I think one of the most challenging things about the way the mainstream immigrant advocacy efforts over the last 20 years have hurt our ability to make the case for immigrants is that they’ve really reinforced the idea of the good immigrant versus bad immigrant. And when they’re talking about the “good immigrant,” a lot of it really pushes this idea of immigrant exceptionalism or productivity, or immigrants are better than everyone else.

Often there’s this narrative of “immigrants commit less crimes than US citizens,” which just reinforces both anti-Black racism and the idea that immigration is about public safety, which it’s not.

And so again, as I was saying before, immigration is really largely about labor and family relationships, and also the root causes of migration. A lot of the narrative hasn’t allowed us to talk about US empire, and the role that the US has played in destabilizing a lot of other countries and conditions for people across the world.

So when I think about a vision—and I hope that we can move forward in a different way—is that actually part of the reason immigrants have been able to be scapegoated is because the US government and billionaires have created a crisis, an economic crisis, for so many people. And what we really need to understand is that immigrants are central to our community, that we are in this together—like having better healthcare; having better, more affordable housing; having better education opportunities, those things are going to make it easier for us to make the case for immigrants.

So I think, actually, we need to really deeply show that immigration is connected to every issue, whether it be climate, whether it be housing, etc., all these things, and see us in it together and think about this as a broader question of working people, working-class, poor people, and really not exceptionalizing immigrants.

And the other thing I would just say is that in so many ways, immigration detention in particular is being treated as an aside, as this other issue: small, not big, and whatever, there’s mass incarceration, there’s deportation. But now it’s being used as a testing ground for Trump’s authoritarianism. And so we really need to see that, actually, the way they’re operating around immigration creates risks for all of us. And, again, the reason why it’s so important that we see our struggles intertwined, and that we work together on this.

JJ: We’ve been speaking with Silky Shah from the Detention Watch Network. They’re online at DetentionWatchNetwork.org. Thank you so much, Silky Shah, for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

SS: Thanks so much for having me.

 

 

https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin250718.mp3

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

 

Truthout (6/11/25)

This week on CounterSpin: The US official stance about the UN is, basically, they’re not the boss of us. But: If it looks like they can make hay with it, then sure. That’s why Secretary of State Marco Rubio is declaring “sanctions” against Francesca Albanese, the UN special rapporteur for the West Bank and Gaza, following an unsuccessful pressure campaign to force the UN to remove her from her post. Albanese has long been clear in calling on the international community to halt Israel’s genocide of Palestinians—but the thing that broke US warmongers was her naming in a recent report of corporations that are profiting from that genocide. We’ll talk about why talking about profiteering is so key with Iman Abid, director of advocacy and organizing at the US Campaign for Palestinian Rights.

https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin250718Abid.mp3

 

New York Times (7/2/25)

Also on the show, and to the point: Victor Pickard will join us to talk about corporate actions that make sense as business deals—but, because this country has chosen to run the democratic lifeblood of journalism as just another business, affect everyone relying on news media to tell us about the world. Victor Pickard is professor of media policy and political economy at the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School for Communication, where he codirects the Media, Inequality & Change Center. He’s the author, most recently, of Democracy Without Journalism? from Oxford University press.

https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin250718Pickard.mp3

 

President Donald Trump has just signed into law what will go down as perhaps the most significant legislative achievement of his second term in office. Dubbed the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, the legislation is set to extend most of the tax cuts passed in Trump’s first term, while making deep cuts to social programs and gutting Biden-era climate provisions, among other sweeping changes (FAIR.org, 7/9/25).

The bill will have a remarkably regressive distributional impact. While top incomes will balloon by thousands of dollars, lower-income Americans will actually see their incomes decline. One analysis from before the bill’s final passage found that its major provisions would reduce incomes for the bottom 20% by about 2%.

Tax cuts, after all, are only one part of the bill. More relevant to lower-income Americans is that this bill will deliver the largest cuts to Medicaid and food stamps in US history.

Such a historic weakening of the safety net—the programs that support the finances of lower-income Americans—should warrant not only major attention, but significant scrutiny from national media outlets. And yet, at the New York Times, the approach has been to distract and obscure above all else.

‘Defined by staggering debt’

As Trump slashed $1 trillion from healthcare, the New York Times (6/27/25) stressed the importance of reducing the deficit. 

One manifestation of this approach has been the Times’ insistence on elevating the bill’s effect on the debt as a foremost concern. In the week or so leading up to the bill’s passage, in fact, both an editorial (6/27/25) and an episode of the Times’ flagship podcast the Daily (7/2/25) were dedicated entirely to a discussion of the national debt.

The Daily episode went as far as claiming, “The legislation is defined by the staggering amount of debt that it’s creating.” It then warned of the potential for a debt “doom loop,” whereby rising debt raises borrowing costs and forces the government to issue more debt in order to pay for its existing debt load.

Meanwhile, the Times editorial board opted to focus more heavily on the costs already being imposed by high federal debt. In a piece titled “The National Debt Is Already Causing Bigger Problems Than People Realize,” the board highlighted the “staggering amount of money” the government puts towards interest payments each year. The board’s solution:

The government needs to raise taxes, especially on the wealthy, and it needs to make long-term changes in Social Security and Medicare, the major drivers of spending growth.

In other words, at a time when the Republican Party is gutting the safety net in epic fashion, the New York Times is coyly hinting that Social Security and Medicare will need to be cut.

‘Enough to repair every bridge’

The New York Times‘ own chart (6/27/25) indicates that Trump’s budget bill will have only a modest impact on US interest payments. What did cause interest costs to soar was the political decision to fight inflation through higher interest rates, a decision the Times applauded  (FAIR.org, 1/25/23, 6/27/23).

Across both the editorial and the podcast episode, the primary reason put forward by the Times for concern over the national debt was the borrowing costs associated with it. But is the bill’s effect on borrowing costs—the amount of money the federal government will have to spend to pay off the interest on its debts—genuinely that significant of a concern?

The Times editorial board seems to think so. Warning of the ill effects of increasing borrowing costs, the board observed:

The House version of Mr. Trump’s bill, already approved by that chamber, would increase interest payments on the debt by an average of $55 billion a year over the next decade, according to the Congressional Budget Office. The increase alone is enough money to fully repair every bridge in the United States.

This comparison is useful to a degree. It exposes the priorities of the Trump administration, which seems to value tax cuts for the wealthy above delivering basic public goods.

But the comparison ultimately obscures more than it illuminates. The reality is that $55 billion is a relatively small sum for the US government. It represents only about 0.8% of the 2024 federal budget, and 0.2% of US GDP.

High cost of high interest rates

The interest rate on 10-year US Treasury bills has risen from 0.6% in 2020 to 4.5% today (chart: CNBC).

The total amount the federal government pays in interest—the amount it pays in excess of what it borrowed when it pays back loans—is of course much larger: The Times relays that interest payments are on pace to surpass $1 trillion this year, representing around 15% of last year’s federal budget. As the editorial board notes, this level of spending on interest payments crowds out other, more useful spending by the government. In other words, it does impose a not-insignificant cost.

What the board de-emphasizes or ignores, however, is that high interest payments are really just a symptom of other more fundamental policy choices.

On the one hand, they reflect the political decision to rely on the blunt instrument of interest rates to combat the pandemic-era spike in inflation. The result has been a rise in interest rates on ten-year government bonds, from under 1% in 2020 to above 4% today.

This was not an inevitable development. Other methods exist for combating inflation. But these methods were sidelined in favor of a regressive, debt-inflating approach. Would you know this by reading the Times editorial? Absolutely not.

The incredibly low tax rate

The United States has one of the lowest effective tax rates among wealthy countries (chart: Tax Policy Center).

On the other hand, high interest payments also reflect the political decision to run up the US debt load through tax cuts for the wealthy. This history of tax cuts is discussed by the editorial board, but it is framed as more of a secondary issue. Little would readers know that the crowding-out effect imposed by high interest payments, which the Times depicts climbing above the cost of Social Security in coming years, is dwarfed by the crowding-out effect of low tax revenue.

For such a rich country, the US collects incredibly little in taxes. Its tax revenue registers a meager 29% of GDP, compared to 42% in Canada, 52% in France and 62% in Norway.

Meanwhile, interest payments as a percentage of GDP are set to double over the next 30 years, reaching about 6% of GDP in the 2050s. That’s not even half the revenue deficit the US faces versus Canada—and Canada’s a low-tax country compared to France and Norway!

The Times nonetheless has run no editorial in recent months decrying the US for being such a low-tax country. Even in its editorial about interest payments, a breakdown of the pitiful state of US tax collection by international standards is nowhere to be found. Instead, we get a muddled denunciation of the bill’s irresponsible contribution to burdensome borrowing costs.

But, again, the bill’s contribution is tiny. Yes, interest payments are projected to reach 6% of GDP by the 2050s, but they will hit 5% even in the absence of this bill. With this single percentage of GDP boost in borrowing costs, the bill imposes a cost in 30 years that is a fraction of the cost of our tax deficit versus Canada today.

‘People benefit from working’

In its one editorial (5/23/25) on the reconciliation bill’s cuts to the safety net, the New York Times endorsed the idea “that some government benefits should be tied to employment.”

This is not to say that the Big Beautiful Bill will not impose Major Gratuitous Pain. But it is to say that such pain will not be found in an analysis of its impact on borrowing costs.

Rather, where we should look to see clear evidence of negative effects is the savings side of the bill, where Republicans have enacted brutal cuts to the social safety net, cuts that the economist James Galbraith calls “the direct result of bipartisan scaremongering over deficits and debt.”

The Times editorial board has run one editorial (5/23/25) on the bill’s cuts to the safety net. Published over a month before the bill’s passage, the piece was headlined “Republicans Can’t Hide Medicaid Cuts in a ‘Big, Beautiful’ Bill.” As it pointed out, the Republican bill would reverse the progress that has been made over the past decade or so in expanding health insurance access to more Americans.

Oddly, however, the editorial extended an olive branch to the GOP, conceding:

We are sympathetic to the idea that some government benefits should be tied to employment. People benefit from working, and society benefits when more people are working.

Explaining the decision to insert this concession into the piece, editorial director David Leonhardt (New York Times, 7/1/25) has since elaborated:

I actually understand why, at a top-line way, people would want to put work requirements on a federal program, and actually I do think there are federal programs that should have work requirements. I’m a pretty big skeptic of universal basic income, of the idea that we’re just going to have the federal government give people lots of money outright. I don’t think it’s worked very well. I think it’s hugely expensive.

This is a baffling explanation. As worded in the editorial, it appears that the board is expressing sympathy for work requirements for some existing government benefits, and justifying them with reference to the value of work, despite work requirements’ long history of doing nothing to increase employment. Yet Leonhardt gives no example of a current government program that should be saddled with a work requirement. Instead, he merely expresses his opposition to universal basic income, using conservative arguments against the policy in doing so. This level of clarity, however, may be all we can expect from the Times.

Unnoted cutbacks

At least as notable as the contents of the editorials published by the Times on the Big Beautiful Bill is what the Times has failed to highlight about the legislation. After all, the paper has run just two editorials on what is probably the most regressive major piece of legislation in at least a generation. What have these missed? A lot.

For one, the largest cuts to food stamps in history are entirely absent from the Times editorial board’s critiques of the bill. That millions would lose access to food stamps and tens of millions would see their benefits cut is apparently an afterthought for the board. It evidently does not warrant the denunciation that somewhat higher borrowing costs require.

Decimation of clean energy provisions and heavy new restrictions on student loans likewise appear a grand total of zero times in the Times’ editorials on the bill. This is the sort of resistance that the most prominent establishment newspaper in the country has to offer.

‘Big ugly battle’

The situation at the Daily has been better, though it had only a rather low bar to clear. Through the day the bill was signed into law, the show published three episodes on the legislation. The first (6/5/25), titled “The Big Ugly Battle Over the Big Beautiful Bill,” touched on the bill’s attacks on climate provisions in its first half, and devoted its second half to a conversation about cuts to Medicaid.

Food stamps, by contrast, were mentioned in just two sentences. And student loans didn’t make a single appearance.

The following episode (7/2/25), discussed above, centered on the debt, but the third episode (7/4/25) dedicated additional airtime to cuts to the safety net, again including a discussion of Medicaid cuts in the second half of the episode. Its first half also centered the serious negative impacts of the legislation, mostly focusing on the array of tax cuts in the bill, but framing the overall impact as wildly regressive:

The most important thing to know about this package is that it delivers its greatest benefits to the wealthy, and it extracts its greatest cuts on the poor.

The largest cuts to food stamps in American history, however, garnered no airtime. Same goes for the massive pullback in student loans.

A ripple in a tsunami

We found only two New York Times headlines like this one (6/5/25)—out of nearly 800 in its US politics section—that straightforwardly conveyed the impact of the budget bill’s cuts.

Unfortunately, this poor coverage is not limited to Times editorials and the Daily. As it turns out, the news section of the Times has been similarly lacking in serious coverage.

The paper’s US Politics section is case in point. From the start of June through July 4, when Trump signed his bill into law, this section of the Times featured a total of seven articles that mentioned “food stamp(s),” “SNAP” or “food aid” in either their headline or subhead. For “Medicaid,” “health cuts” and “Obamacare,” the number was ten.

But few of these articles bore headlines straightforwardly reporting the facts of what’s projected to happen to millions of Americans as a result of cuts to food stamps and healthcare spending. In total, only two headlines, both about healthcare, really fit this description:

• “GOP Bill Has $1.1 Trillion in Health Cuts and 11.8 Million Losing Care, CBO Says” (6/29/25)
• “Millions Would Lose Their Obamacare Coverage Under Trump’s Bill” (6/5/25)

Other headlines mentioned cuts, but some didn’t even reference that information. For instance, one headline (6/3/25) read, “Trump Administration Backs Off Effort to Collect Data on Food Stamp Recipients.”

Amazingly, at least in the US Politics section of the paper, zero headlines included the phrase “student loans,” despite substantial retrenchment in student loan policy. The term “safety net” appeared in the headline or subhead of only six articles.

With around 800 articles appearing in the Times’ US Politics section during this timeframe, coverage of historic cuts to crucial safety net programs resembled a ripple in a tsunami.

‘Fair to criticize Democrats’

The type sizes conveys the relative importance the New York Times (7/1/25) places on prices paid by politicians vs. those paid by the public.

Nonetheless, when Times editorial director David Leonhardt was asked whether he thinks “Americans who will be impacted by these cuts understand what’s happening,” given the lack of public outcry so far, he gave credit to Republicans for succeeding in minimizing public opposition, and blamed Democrats for failing to make a bigger deal out of the bill:

I also think it’s fair to criticize the Democratic Party and activists who are aligned with the Democratic Party for not figuring out ways to make a bigger deal out of these cuts. To some extent, they’ve allowed the Republican cynical strategy of staying away from town halls to work better than it might have.

The role of corporate media, and more particularly of the New York Times, may never have even crossed Leonhardt’s mind. But, of course, the Times is a critical player in US politics. With around 12 million subscribers and millions of daily listeners to the Daily, the outlet has incredible reach. If it wanted to, the Times could play a significant role in raising public awareness of this bill. The problem is that it seems completely uninterested in adopting this role.

I would argue, therefore, that the paltry public outcry is fundamentally a result of editorial decisions, not least those made at the Times. By refusing to cover cuts to the social safety net with more than minimal urgency, the Times has done a good deal to deprive the Democratic Party and other opponents of the legislation of the sort of informational environment in which public opposition to harmful policies can be effectively mobilized.

Through inaction, through poor coverage, the Times is making a political choice to undermine opposition to some of the Trump administration’s most damaging policies.