FAIR

 

Janine Jackson interviewed the Center for Constitutional Rights’ Baher Azmy about the Abu Ghraib lawsuit for the August 18, 2023, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

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New York Times (8/8/23)

Janine Jackson: Earlier this month, the New York Times ran a report on the Arlington National Cemetery burial of Ian Fishback, a former Special Forces officer who, as the Times said, “dared to challenge the Army on its soldiers’ sustained abuse of Iraqi and Afghan men in their custody.”

Fishback’s testimony “unequivocally characterizing the soldiers’ behavior as torture,” the paper explained, “shattered the Pentagon’s insistence that the torture in [Abu Ghraib] was an isolated case,” but it did lead to personal harm and hardship for Fishback.

Of course, the actions that Fishback was moved to denounce had horrific and enduring impacts on many other people, starting with the victims of the torture.

The Times has unfortunately been not particularly interested in the stubborn insistence of those people in having their case heard. One piece in March noted that opponents of the Iraq War say that “the shame of the American abuses of prisoners at Abu Ghraib…have not been forgotten by history,” but it’s disheartening that that sentence appeared within a piece centered on how George W. Bush “doesn’t second-guess himself on Iraq.”

The ongoing case against military contractor CACI Premier Technology, Inc., hired to provide interrogation services at Abu Ghraib, is a chance for reporters to prevent our forgetting.

The Center for Constitutional Rights has been leading that case, which a federal judge has just said can move forward, since June 2008. We’re joined now by phone by Baher Azmy, legal director of the Center for Constitutional Rights. Welcome back to CounterSpin, Baher Azmy.

Baher Azmy: Thank you for having me.

JJ: If you would ground us, first of all, with some context: This case is against a military contractor, not against the US government per se, and it’s about just a handful of plaintiffs. It’s not the be-all, end-all on the horrors of Abu Ghraib, much less the invasion and the war, but it is the last case standing, and it carries meaning, within itself and beyond itself, would you say?

BA: Yeah, that’s right. This is actually the third of three cases we brought on behalf of Iraqi victims of torture by the US government and private military contractors in Iraq and Abu Ghraib.

One case was thrown out by the DC Federal Court of Appeals, led by Kavanaugh, with a dissent from then-Judge Garland; a second case on behalf of 71 individuals brought against a translation company, L-3 Services, that settled favorably; and this, the third, is brought on behalf of three remaining plaintiffs, three victims of torture at the so-called “hard site” at Abu Ghraib, where all of the depictions of torture we have seen were revealed.

And it’s very challenging to sue the US military for torture, but US generals did an investigation of the torture at Abu Ghraib and identified that private military contractors, including CACI, had a preeminent role.

CACI sent a number of untrained individuals to serve as interrogators, under a very profitable $35 million contract. And as the reports and the evidence revealed, in the command vacuum that occurred at Abu Ghraib, it was CACI interrogators who were telling military police, including people you might recognize if you’re old enough—Lynndie England, Ivan Frederick and Charles Graner—to “soften up” detainees via torture for later interrogation by CACI.

So this seeks accountability against the private military contractor for actions that US service members spent considerable time in a military brig for, and it seeks to close that accountability gap, and hold this profit-making enterprise accountable for its clear role in contributing to the torture and abuse of our plaintiffs.

JJ: I don’t know if it matters to say at this point that prisoners in Abu Ghraib were not criminals—these were not people who were charged and convicted—but maybe that’s worth mentioning here.

BA: Correct. And there are clear, clear duties under the laws of war with respect [to] what is called cruel, inhuman, degrading treatment. And, notably, the judge in this case has found sufficient evidence that CACI was a direct conspirator, aided and abetted the actual torture of our clients, so enough evidence that a jury could find them liable, and that’s what we’re hoping will be the next step in front of a United States jury.

CounterSpin (5/27/16)

JJ: CACI says, as I understand it, that since the United States would have immunity in this case, well, then, we were working for them, so we also have immunity. What do you have to say? I remember an interview with deeply missed CCR president Michael Ratner, explaining in 2004, that this idea that torture isn’t torture came in with US Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, and things went south at that point.

But that’s CACI’s line, that since we’re acting as the government, we therefore have immunity against these charges?

BA: Yeah, it’s interesting. The subtext of this is a really disturbing pattern among all private military contractors, which I think is seeking precisely this: Even though they act for profit, have no sovereign responsibilities, are in no way politically accountable, democratically accountable, they want to assume the same benefits as the government, as if CACI was a sovereign entity rather than a profit-making entity. That seems like a terrifying notion for me.

And the subtext is, I think, ultimately, from a range of private military contractors, to get the law and the police to fulfill a kind of Erik Prince–ian vision, where private military contractors can go into war spaces and enjoy the same immunity as the United States government.

And so far, the courts have plainly resisted that: You’re not allowed to assume the immunity of the United States government if you yourself have broken the law, even as a contractor.

And the courts have rejected CACI’s argument, building on what John Yoo and Dick Cheney have said—that these are not legal questions, they’re political questions, that they’re out of the jurisdiction of the courts, what we choose to do with prisoners during wartime. And the court flatly rejected that, and said they can be accountable for torture, even if they were participating with the military.

JJ: All right, then. Well, for many people, Abu Ghraib is a series of horrific photographs, and maybe the government’s efforts to suppress them, the media’s release of them, and then a kind of collective gasp—”shocking the conscience,” we heard.

But then we got the sense, vaguely speaking, that since we’ve had our conscience shocked, we’ve addressed it, and so let’s all move on from that difficult time.

But if no real deep-going, up-to-the-top accountability happens, aren’t we just setting ourselves up for the next, “Oh my gosh, that’s terrible” that’s carried out in our name?

Baher Azmy: “The problem with not holding high-level officials to account is these abuses get replicated and indeed escalated.” (image: Democracy Now!, 8/8/23)

BA: I really quite agree, as someone who’s been heavily involved and early involved in the responses to the human rights crisis created by the Bush administration and the lawlessness there. I draw a connection between the kind of soft authoritarianism of the Bush administration, and the sanctioned lawlessness and demand for impunity and subverting US institutions and constraints on executive power, to the kind of hard authoritarianism that the Trump administration embraced.

I mean, should we really be surprised by the Muslim ban that Trump escalated, given what the Bush administration tried and largely got away with? Should we be surprised with lawyers, like John Yoo in the torture context and John Eastman in the insurrection context, trying to sanction or legitimize, under law, subverting American institutions?

I think precisely the problem with not holding high-level officials to account is these abuses get replicated and indeed escalated.

JJ: Well, we’re going to end on that important note. We’ve been speaking with Baher Azmy, legal director at the Center for Constitutional Rights. You can track their work, including on this case, which is not closed but is going forward, at CCRJustice.org. Baher Azmy, thank you so much for joining us this week on CounterSpin

BA: Thank you very much.

 

The post ‘CACI Aided and Abetted the Torture of Our Clients’ appeared first on FAIR.

 

Janine Jackson interviewed Gizmodo‘s Thomas Germain about the destruction of online history for the August 18, 2023, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

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Janine Jackson: In the 1980s, when we at FAIR would talk about how the goals of journalism as a public service, and of information as a public good, were in conflict with those of media as a profit-driven business, we were often met with the contention that the internet was going to make that conflict meaningless, by democratizing access to information and somehow sidelining that profit motive with—technology!

Well, now we’re here, and much of our lives are online. It’s where many get news and information, how we communicate and learn. But power is still power, and the advertising model that drives so much fear and favor in traditional journalism is still in effect.

So, while much is different, there are still core questions to consider when you’re trying to figure out why some kinds of news or “content” is in your face, like it or not, and why some perspectives are very hard to find, and why there’s so much garbage to get through to get to any of it.

Our next guest’s job is to report on life online. Thomas Germain is a senior reporter at Gizmodo. He joins us now by phone from here in town. Welcome to CounterSpin, Thomas Germain.

Thomas Germain: Happy to be here.

JJ: There are internet rules that are not visible to all users, particularly those of us who aren’t looking into the gears of the thing, you know? We just want to read articles, or look at cats falling off chairs.

But as “offline” media have unseen rules—like if a sponsor can’t be found to buy ads on a show, well, that show’s not going to air, no matter how much people might like it—there are also behind-the-scenes factors for internet content that are not journalistic factors, if you will.

I wonder if you would talk us through what CNET—which many listeners will know is a longstanding website dedicated to tech news—is currently doing, and what do you think it means or portends?

Gizmodo (8/9/23)

TG: Yeah, so CNET is one of the oldest technology news sites on the internet. It’s been around since 1995, and they have tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands, of articles that they’ve put up over the years.

But I got a tip that CNET had started deleting its old content, because of the theory about improving the site’s performance on Google. And I went and I checked it out, and what I found was the company has been deleting thousands of its own articles.

Now, there’s a lot of complicated reasons that this is happening, but the No. 1 thing that people need to understand is a lot of the writing that happens on the internet is aimed as much at robots as it is at humans. And what I mean here is the algorithms that run Google search, right? Almost all internet traffic is driven by how high you show up in the search results on Google.

And there’s an entire industry called “search engine optimization” that is essentially a kind of gamified effort to get your content and your website and individual pages to perform better on Google.

And this is actually a huge thing that drives the journalism business. It’s the reason that you look at articles and you see the same keyword repeated over and over. It’s basically one of the things that dictates what subjects journalists write about, what’s covered and how it’s written.

Search Engine Roundtable (4/30/20)

And the performance of your entire site dictates how your individual pages will do. And Google issued some guidance last year which suggested that if you’ve got some content on your site that’s not performing well, it might help if you take it down. It didn’t say this explicitly, but a lot of companies, CNET included, have been going through and looking at pages that aren’t performing well, which tends to be older content.

And some of that content, they’re redirecting the URL of that page to other articles that they want to promote. And in some cases, they’re taking it down altogether.

So the effect of this is this kind of ironic thing, right? Google‘s entire reason for being is to make information easier to find, but in effect, because of the design of their algorithms, they’re actually encouraging companies, indirectly, to take some information off the internet altogether.

JJ: Because if folks are not “engaging”—that’s the word we’ve all learned to use—with a particular piece that a website might have up, then that’s dragging down the SEO of the site generally, is what you’re saying? Like if you have a lot of content that folks are not actively engaging with, then maybe your new stuff might not show up so high up on Google. Is that, vaguely, somewhere in the ballpark of what’s happening?

Gizmodo (11/15/19)

TG: That’s basically it. It’s really complicated. And also, we don’t really know exactly what’s going on here. Google isn’t super transparent about the way that its algorithms function, and search engine optimization, or SEO, is as much a guessing game as it is based on actual data. There’s some information that journalists and content publishers have access to, about how certain things are performing, but in other cases, it’s just best practices, and people crossing their fingers, essentially.

So the one thing we know for sure is the more content that’s on your website, the longer it takes Google‘s robots, they call them “crawlers,” to go through every page, which is how the company determines how certain pages will rank for search results.

So what they’ve said is, you’ve got a giant, old site like CNET, and there’s some content that’s not performing well, shrinking that down, they call it “content pruning,” can help you increase the performance of the content that you want to promote. So in effect, it could be an advantage to you, if you’ve got a giant site, to take some of that content down.

JJ: I think listeners will already understand the harm that that does to public information and to journalism, because obviously we think of the internet, dumbly perhaps, as an archive, and there is a severe loss implied in sites like CNET, and others if they follow their lead, in deleting old material.

TG: Yeah. Journalism, they say that it’s the first draft of history, right? And if you’re doing any kind of archival research, if you want to know what people were talking about in 1997, it helps to be able to have a record of all these old articles, even if no one’s reading them, even if they’re about topics that don’t have any obvious importance now. CNET used the example of old articles that talk about the prices of AOL, which is a thing that you can’t even get anymore.

But this stuff can be important for reasons that aren’t immediately obvious. And the loss of this information can really have a serious detrimental effect on the public record.

Wayback Machine

There are some companies that are working to preserve this stuff. The most well-known one is the Internet Archive. It’s got this tool called the Wayback Machine, which goes and preserves copies of webpages.

And CNET says that before it deletes content, it lets the Internet Archive know to make a copy of it, so it’s not gone forever. And they say they preserve their own copy, but they’re relying on a third-party service that’s a nonprofit to maintain this content, and who knows whether it’s going to be around in the long term.

But there’s an effect on the journalists, right? Because you want a record of your work in order to just keep track of what you’ve done, but also to have stuff to put in your portfolio to get new jobs. So the erasure of this content can be a problem, for just the general public and for history, but also for the people who are tasked with writing this stuff in the first place.

JJ: Absolutely. And, of course, who knows what’s going to be interesting from the past to look back on, because, who knows, you can’t predict what you might want to go back and look through. You know, maybe AOL will come up in the future, and we’ll want to know what was said about it at the time. So it seems like a loss.

Futurama (4/27/99)

Well, I’m going to ask you to switch gears just for a second. I have been recently thinking about a line in the show Futurama, when Fry, who has been transported to the far future, is shocked because a commercial appears in his dream. And Leela says, “Didn’t you have ads in the 21st century?” And Fry says:

Well, sure, but not in our dreams. Only on TV and radio and in magazines and movies and at ball games and on buses and milk cartons and T-shirts and bananas and written on the sky. But not in dreams! No siree.

I think of that every time my phone beeps at 2:00 AM and it’s Spotify saying, “Hey, uh, there’s a playlist that you might like,” that’s not anything I signed up for. What is up with what definitely feels like an increase in ads, and in intrusive ads, in all of the online spaces that we see? What’s going on there?

TG: Yeah, I think this is something that everybody experiences, you’re aware of it, we all know that we’re seeing more ads, but I think people don’t quite recognize how prevalent it is and how dramatically it’s changed.

And it’s actually a recent change. So over the last year, we’ve seen a massive increase in the amount of advertising. We’re seeing it in places we’ve never seen before; Uber, I think, is an example, where we’re getting pop-up notifications that have ads in them, but just about every context you can think of: I saw an ad in a fortune cookie the other day. If there’s a space where there’s people’s eyes, it’s being turned into a space for advertising.

And there are two, I think, counterintuitive reasons that this is happening. And the first one’s actually because there are increasingly regulations and restrictions about privacy, right? There’s laws, more so in Europe than in the United States, that are restricting the ways that companies can collect and use your data.

And simultaneously, Google and Apple, who control all of the phones, understand that the writing is on the wall here, and they’re trying to get out in front of regulation before it happens, by putting their own limits on how companies collect data on their platforms.

Now what this does is it makes advertising less profitable, right, because targeted ads make more money than regular ads. But those targeted ads need lots of data. And if the data’s harder to find, it’s harder to make money if you’re a company that makes its cash on ads.

So what do you do in that situation? You just increase the number of ads that you’re showing people.

Thomas Germain: “If…you need to add a new revenue stream and you don’t have any great ideas, the obvious one is to add more ads to your platform.”

Simultaneously, there’s this other thing that’s happening in the technology industry, which is the economy, right? The federal government has raised interest rates; that makes it more expensive to borrow money. And all of this endless runway that the technology companies had for the better part of the decade is suddenly drying up.

And there’s been this shift where investors have started to understand that the technology industry isn’t some kind of magic money printing machine, and people are expecting more return on their investment.

So if you’re a company, and you need to add a new revenue stream and you don’t have any great ideas, the obvious one is to add more ads to your platform, or put them in places where they’ve never been before.

So there’s these two competing forces, right, privacy and the economy, that are pushing companies to inundate us with ads. And it’s really grown to an astonishing level.

I saw a study—and this is from a couple years ago, it’s gotten worse—where in the ’70s, we saw on average between 500 to 1,000 ads a day. Now the number is somewhere between 5,000 to 10,000 ads that everyone is seeing on average in a single day, which seems like a lot, but we become blind to it.

If you add up the ads you’re seeing on TV, all the sponsored posts, all the videos on TikTok where someone’s been paid to promote a product, the ads we’re seeing on bus stops and, you know, the little TVs at the grocery station…. There’s just constant advertising being blasted at us.

And we don’t know, for example, among other potential problems, how this might affect people’s psyche. It’s kind of a mass experiment that we’re all going through at the same time, and we don’t know what the effects are going to be.

JJ: We did have laws at some point about that, but it certainly seems that laws and regulation are, let’s just say, not keeping up.

TG: Yeah, absolutely. You know, most of the laws that govern the internet are laws that were adapted from other purposes, from the ’90s. For example, health privacy rules are based on a law that was written in 1996 in the United States.

Part of the problem here is regulators don’t really understand what’s going on, and that’s to say nothing about our aging population of politicians. People don’t really understand how the internet works in the first place, let alone the ability to come to a consensus on what we should do.

So the internet, more or less, is a place that is unregulated. It’s getting a little better, but we’ve got a lot of catching up to do.

JJ: We’re going to end on that note, which is not an end note, but a question about moving forward. We’ve been speaking with Thomas Germain, senior reporter at Gizmodo, online at Gizmodo.com. Thomas Germain, thank you so much for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

TG: Thank you. Great to talk to you.

 

The post ‘Erasure of Content Can Be a Problem for the Public and for History’ appeared first on FAIR.

 

Do Palestinians deserve to be free? “A complex and controversial issue,” says ChatGPT (Twitter, 5/8/23). Do Israelis deserve to be free? “Yes, like all people.”

“This is quite something,” remarked Nadi Abusaada in a May 8 tweet. As many of us have done, the Palestinian academic found himself experimenting with the seemingly boundless powers of OpenAI’s ChatGPT software. But during this activity, he uncovered something disturbing.

“I asked @OpenAI whether Palestinians deserve to be free,” he said. The natural-language processing tool responded to Abusaada’s query ambivalently:

As an AI language model, I do not have personal opinions, feelings or beliefs. The question of whether Palestinians deserve to be free is a complex and controversial issue with many different perspectives and opinions….

But then he posed the same question about Israelis. This time, the chat box did not equivocate:

Yes, like all people, Israelis deserve to be free. Freedom is a fundamental human right that should be protected and guaranteed for all individuals, regardless of their nationality, ethnicity or religion. It is essential that Israelis, like all people, are able to live their lives free from violence, oppression and discrimination….

“Explanation?” demanded Abusaada.

The explanation lies in the overarching attitudes of the 570 GB of data that ChatGPT scrapes from the internet. And, with news media being one of the primary sources of information that the bot is trained on, Abusaada’s experience is hardly surprising.

To say that US news skews pro-Israel raises many an eyebrow, since the public has been conditioned to believe otherwise. With outlets like NPR vilified as “National Palestinian Radio” and papers like the New York Times castigated by pro-Israel watchdogs for lending “the Palestinian narrative” undue credence (CAMERA, 10/15/13), the myth of pro-Palestine bias appears plausible.

Yet such claims have been litigated, and the verdict is plain: US corporate media lean in favor of Israel. As Abeer Al-Najjar (New Arab, 7/28/22) noted: “The framing, sourcing, selection of facts, and language choices used to report on Palestine…often reveal systematic biases which distort the Palestinian struggle.” Some trends are more ubiquitous than others, which is why it is vital that news readers become acquainted with the tropes that dominate coverage of the Israeli occupation.

1. Where Are the Palestinians?

From 1970 to 2019, the New York Times and Washington Post ran 5,739 opinion pieces about Palestinians. Just 1.4% of these were by Palestinians (+972, 10/2/20).

In 2018, 416Labs, a Canadian research firm, analyzed almost 100,000 news headlines published by five leading US publications between 1967 and 2017. The study revealed that major newspapers were four times more likely to run headlines from an Israeli government perspective, and 2.5 times more likely to cite Israeli sources over Palestinian ones. (This trend was further confirmed by Maha Nassar—+972, 10/2/20).

Owais Zaheer, an author of 416Labs’ study told the Intercept (1/12/19) that his findings call attention to “the need to more critically evaluate the scope of coverage of the Israeli occupation and recognize that readers are getting, at best, a heavily filtered rendering of the issue.”

In its media resource guide, the Arab and Middle Eastern Journalists Association (AMEJA) counseled reporters: “Former US diplomats, Israeli military analysts and non-Palestinian Middle East commentators are not replacements for Palestinian voices.”

The exclusion of Palestinian voices from corporate media reporting does not stop at sourcing. For example, contrary to its pro-Israel critics, NPR’s correspondents are rarely Palestinian or Arab, and almost all reside in West Jerusalem or Israel proper (FAIR.org, 4/2/18). Editors also overlook obvious conflicts of interest, like when the son of the New York Times‘ then–Israel bureau chief Ethan Bronner joined the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) (Extra!, 4/10).

When Times public editor Clark Hoyt (2/6/10) acknowledged that readers aware of the son’s role “could reasonably wonder how that would affect the father,” Times executive editor Bill Keller rejected this advice, saying that having a child fighting for Israel gave Bronner “a measure of sophistication about Israel and its adversaries that someone with no connections would lack,” and might “make him even more tuned-in to the sensitivities of readers on both sides.” It’s hard to imagine Keller suggesting this if Bronner’s son had, say, signed up with Hamas.

Hirsh Goodman, the Israeli spin doctor married to the New York Times‘ Jerusalem bureau chief.

Isabel Kershner, the current Jerusalem correspondent for the Times, also had a son who enlisted in the IDF (Mondoweiss, 10/27/14). Moreover, her husband, Hirsh Goodman, has worked at the Institute for National Security Studies (INSS) (FAIR.org, 5/1/12), where his job was

shaping a positive image of Israel in the media. An examination of articles that Kershner has written or contributed to since 2009 reveals that she overwhelmingly relies on the INSS for think tank analysis about events in the region.

When establishment media outlets privilege one narrative over another, public opinion is likely to follow. Thus, the suppression of alternative viewpoints is among today’s most concerning media afflictions.

2. Turning Assaults Into ‘Clashes’

Reporting on Israel/Palestine often relies on a lexical toolbox designed for occlusion rather than clarity, “clashes” rather than “assaults.” Adam Johnson (FAIR.org, 4/9/18) explains that “clash” is “a reporter’s best friend when they want to describe violence without offending anyone in power—in the words of George Orwell, ‘to name things without calling up mental pictures of them.’”

The Washington Post‘s headline (4/6/18) obscures the fact that it is Israel’s “live fire” and not Palestinians’ “burning tires” that are deadly.

FAIR has documented the abuse of “clash” in the Israeli/Palestinian context time and time again: In 2018 Gaza, Israeli troops fired at unarmed protestors 100 meters away. No Israelis perished, but 30 Palestinians were murdered. That was not a “clash,” as establishment media would have you believe; that was a mass shooting (FAIR.org, 5/1/18). During the funeral for Shireen Abu Akleh, the reporter who was assassinated by Israeli gunfire, the IDF beat mourners, charged at them with horses and batons, and deployed stun grenades and tear gas. The procession was so rocked by the attacks that they nearly dropped Abu Akleh’s casket. That was not a clash, that was a senseless act of cruelty (FAIR.org, 7/2/22). This summer, when Israeli forces raided the West Bank and stood by as illegal settlers arsoned homes, farmland and vehicles, that was not a “clash”; that was colonialism (FAIR.org, 7/6/23).

The choice to use “clash”—and other comparably hazy descriptors of regional violence, like “tension,” “conflict” and “strife”—is bad journalism. Such designations lack substance, disorient readers and above all spin a spurious storyline whereby Israelis and Palestinians inflict and withstand equivalent bloodshed. (According to the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem, 3,584 Palestinians have been murdered by Israeli security forces since January 19, 2009, while 196 Israelis have been killed by Palestinians during the same period.)

AMEJA’s media resource guide reminds journalists that the occupation “is not a conflict between states, but rather between Israel, which has one of the most advanced militaries in the world, and the Palestinians, who have no formal army.”

But when such a power imbalance is inadequately acknowledged, “clash” and its misleading corollaries will not sound out of place, and readers will not have the context necessary to separate the perpetrators from the victims of violence.

3. Linguistic Gymnastics

Who killed the two Palestinians? AP (8/4/23) structured its headline to conceal that information.

The passive voice—or, as William Schneider describes it, the “past exonerative” tense—is a grammatical construction that describes events without assigning responsibility. Such sentence structures pervade coverage of the Israeli occupation.

In her 2021 investigation into coverage of the first and second intifadas, Holly M. Jackson identified disproportionate use of the passive voice—i.e., “the man was bitten” rather than “the dog bit the man”—as one of the defining linguistic features of New York Times reporting on the uprisings. The Times used the passive voice to talk about Palestinians twice as often as it did Israelis, which demonstrated the paper’s “clear patterns of bias against Palestinians.”

While Jackson’s study only examined New York Times coverage during the intifadas, passive voice remains a common grammatical cop out—still permeating national newspaper headlines in recent months:

• “At Least Five Palestinians Killed in Clashes After Israeli Raid in West Bank” (New York Times, 6/19/23)
• “Two Palestinians Killed in Separate Episodes in Latest West Bank Violence” (AP, 8/4/23)
• “Israeli Forces Say Three Palestinians Killed in Occupied West Bank” (CNN, 8/7/23)

Other times, raids are miraculously carried out on their own, violence randomly erupts and missiles are inexplicably fired. The now-amended New York Times headline “Missile at Beachside Gaza Cafe Finds Patrons Poised for World Cup” (7/10/14) begged the question: Who fired the missile that, as if it had a mind of its own, “found” Palestinian World Cup spectators?

Similarly, the Washington Post piece “Yet Another Palestinian Journalist Dies on the Job” (5/12/22) leaves the reader puzzled. How exactly did Shireen Abu Akleh—left unnamed in the title—die?

Headlines that omit the Israeli subject are unjustifiably exculpatory, because editors know exactly who the assailant is.

4. Newsworthy and Unnewsworthy Deaths

The New York Times (5/11/21) disguised the reality that 88% of the dead were Palestinian.

Operation Cast Lead, Israel’s three-week military assault on Gaza in 2008, was carnage. According to Amnesty International and B’Tselem, the attack claimed 13 Israeli lives (four of which were killed by Israeli fire), while Palestine’s death toll was nearly 1,400—300 of which were children. Yet the media response was far from proportional.

In a 2010 study of New York Times coverage of Operation Cast Lead, Jonas Caballero found that the Times covered 431% of Israeli deaths—meaning each Israeli fatality was reported an average of four times—while reporting a mere 17% of Palestinian deaths. This means that Israeli deaths were covered at 25 times the rate Palestinian ones were.

The Times is not an outlier. FAIR’s examination (Extra!, 11–12/01) of six months’ worth of NPR Israel/Palestine broadcasting during the Second Intifada determined that 81% of Israeli fatalities were reported on, while Palestinian deaths were acknowledged just 34% of the time. The disparity only widened when Palestinian victims were minors:

Of the 30 Palestinian civilians under the age of 18 that were killed, six were reported on NPR—only 20%. By contrast, the network reported on 17 of the 19 Israeli minors who were killed, or 89%…. Apparently being a minor makes your death more newsworthy to NPR if you are Israeli, but less newsworthy if you are Palestinian.

Media also erase or downplay Palestinian deaths in the language of their headlines. When the New York Times (11/16/14) ran a story entitled “Palestinian Shot by Israeli Troops at Gaza Border” it did not seem to occur to the editor that specifying the age of the victim would be important. The Palestinian in question was a 10-year-old boy. In another headline, “More Than 30 Dead in Gaza and Israel as Fighting Quickly Escalates,” the Times (5/11/21) neatly obscures that 35 out of the “more than 30 dead” were Palestinian, while five were Israeli.

5. Sidelining International Law

A Christian Science Monitor piece (8/9/09) framed the illegal occupation of Palestinian land as being about “freedom, holiness, righteousness and redemption.”

Attempts to insulate Israel from condemnation also manifest themselves in establishment media’s reluctance to identify the country’s breaches of international law (FAIR.org, 12/8/17).

In Operation Cast Lead coverage, FAIR (Extra!, 2/09) noted that—despite the blatant illegality of Israel’s assaults on Palestine’s civilian infrastructure—international law was seldom newsworthy. By January 13, 2009, only two evening news programs  (NBC Nightly News, 1/8/09, 1/11/09) had broached the legality of the Israeli military offensive. But, only one of those TV segments (Nightly News, 1/8/09) reprimanded Israel—the other (Nightly News, 1/11/09) defended the illegal use of white phosphorus, which was being deployed on refugee camps.

Meanwhile, just one daily newspaper (USA Today, 1/7/08) mentioned international law. But that single reference—embedded in an op-ed by a spokesperson from the Israeli embassy in Washington—was directed at Hamas violations, rather than Israeli ones.

When it comes to reporting on the unlawful establishment of Israeli settlements, media are no better. Colonizing occupied territories violates both Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention and Security Council Resolution 446, yet outlets like NPR, CNN and the New York Times have a history of concealing Israeli criminality by benevolently branding settlements as “neighborhoods” (FAIR.org, 8/1/02, 10/10/14).

Such charitable descriptions have also been extended to settlers themselves. In an October 2009 Extra! piece, Julie Hollar investigated a bevy of articles that characterized settlers as “law-abiding,” “soft-spoken,” “gentle” and “normal.” One tone-deaf Christian Science Monitor headline (8/9/09) even read: “Young Israeli Settlers Go Hippie? Far Out, Man!” As Hollar observed, “ethnic cleansing could hardly hope for a friendlier hearing.”

Even when news media have characterized settlements and settlers as engaging in unlawful colonial practices, they have done so reluctantly. In 2021, Israeli settlement expansion in Sheikh Jarrah culminated in an unlawful campaign of mass expulsion. A New York Times (5/7/21) article on the crisis waited until the 39th paragraph before suggesting that Israel was acting criminally. Similarly, while describing Benjamin Netanyahu’s increasingly aggressive settlement policies, Associated Press (6/18/23) buried the lead by avoiding the “illegal” designation until the middle of the piece.

It’s important to bring up the rule of law not only when Israel is actively injuring innocents or erecting colonial communities. The ceaseless maltreatment of Palestinians constitutes—according to Amnesty International, B’Tselem and Human Rights Watch—apartheid. Apartheid is a crime against humanity, yet news media avoid acknowledging the human rights community’s consensus (FAIR.org, 7/21/23, 2/3/22, 4/26/19). As FAIR (5/23/23) pointed out, it is a journalistic duty to do so:

The dominant and overriding context of anything that happens in Israel/Palestine is the fact that the state of Israel is running an apartheid regime in the entirety of the territory it controls. Any obfuscation or equivocation of that fact serves only to downplay the severity of Israeli crimes and the US complicity in them.

6. Reversing Victim and Victimizer

As is typical, “retaliation” is used by Reuters (9/12/21) to refer to Israeli violence against Palestinians—implicitly justifying it as a response rather than an escalation.

As Gregory Shupak (FAIR.org, 5/18/21) wrote:

Only the Israeli side has ethnically cleansed and turned millions…into refugees by preventing [Palestinians] from exercising their right to return to their homes. Israel is the only side subjecting anyone to apartheid and military occupation.

Nevertheless, US media enter into fantastical rationalizations to make the Israeli aggressor appear to be the victim. Blaming Palestinians for their suffering and dispossession has become one of the prime ways to accomplish this feat.

A 2018 FAIR report (5/17/18) analyzed coverage of the deadly Great March of Return—protests that erupted in response to Israel’s illegal land, air and sea blockade on the Gaza Strip. The ongoing siege bans the import of raw materials and significantly curtails the movement of people and goods. The International Committee of the Red Cross (6/14/10) deplores the blockade: “The whole of Gaza’s civilian population is being punished for acts for which they bear no responsibility.”

Despite the ICRC indictment, FAIR found that established media held besieged Palestinians accountable for Israel’s reign of terror following anti-blockade demonstrations. The New York Times (5/14/18) editorial board went so far as to suggest that Palestinians (and not the siege-imposing Israel) were the only obstacles to peace:

Led too long by men who were corrupt or violent or both, the Palestinians have failed and failed again to make their own best efforts toward peace. Even now, Gazans are undermining their own cause by resorting to violence, rather than keeping their protests strictly peaceful.

Casting Palestinians as incorrigible savages is also easier when US media use defensive language to excuse the bulk of Israeli violence (FAIR.org, 2/2/09, 7/10/14). FAIR (5/1/02) conducted a survey into ABC, CBS and NBC’s use of the word “retaliation”—a term that “lays responsibil­ity for the cycle of violence at the doorstep of the party being ‘retaliated’ against, since they presumably initiated the conflict.” Of the 150 mentions of “retaliation” and its analogs between September 2000 and March 17, 2002, 79% referred to Israeli violence. Twelve percent were ambiguous, or encompassed both sides. A mere 9% framed Palestinian violence as a retaliatory response.

Greg Philo and Mike Berry’s books Bad News From Israel and More Bad News From Israel posit that television’s “Palestinian action/Israeli retaliation” trope has a “significant effect” on how the public remember events and allot blame (FAIR.org, 8/21/20). When Palestinians are consistently portrayed as the aggressive party and Israel as the defensive one, US news media are “effectively legitimizing Israeli actions.”

Coverage of the Russian invasion of Ukraine celebrates the efforts of Ukrainian resistance. With the anti-imperial Palestinian struggle, however, news media refuse to extend the same favor (FAIR.org, 7/6/23), thus creating a

media landscape where certain groups are entitled to self-defense, and others are doomed to be the victims of  “reprisal” attacks. It tells the world that…Palestinians living under apartheid have no right to react to the almost daily raids, growing illegal settlements and ballooning settler hostility.

***

Malcolm X once declared,“If you’re not careful, the newspapers will have you hating the people who are being oppressed, and loving the people who are doing the oppressing.” As stories about Israel/Palestine continue to bombard our screens and daily papers, readers and journalists alike need to remain aware of the pro-Israel pitfalls that pockmark establishment news coverage. Then maybe one day we can move towards a future where ChatGPT answers “yes” when users like Abusaada ask it whether Palestinians deserve to be free.

 

The post Six Tropes to Look Out for That Distort Israel/Palestine Coverage appeared first on FAIR.

 

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Victim of US torture at Abu Ghraib, 2003

This week on CounterSpin: For corporate news media, every mention of the Iraq War is a chance to fuzz up or rewrite history a little more. This year, the New York Times honored the war’s anniversary with a friendly piece about how George W. Bush “doesn’t second guess himself on Iraq,” despite pesky people mentioning things like the torture of innocent prisoners at the Abu Ghraib prison.

Federal Judge Leonie Brinkema has just refused to dismiss a long standing case brought against Abu Ghraib torturers for hire, the company known as CACI.  Unlike elite media’s misty memories, the case is a real-world, stubborn indication that what happened happened and those responsible have yet to be called to account. We can call the case, abstractly, “anti-torture” or “anti-war machine,” as though it were a litmus test on those things; but we can’t forget that it’s pro–Suhail al-Shimari, pro–Salah al-Ejaili,   pro– all the other human beings horrifically abused in that prison in our name.  We get an update on the still-ongoing case—despite some 18 attempts to dismiss it—from Baher Azmy, legal director at the Center for Constitutional Rights.

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Gizmodo (8/9/23)

Also on the show: The internet? Am i right? Thomas Germain is senior reporter at Gizmodo; he fills us in on some new developments in the online world most of us, like it or not, live in and rely on. Developments to do with ads, ads and still more ads, and also with the disappearing and potential disappearing of decades of archived information and reporting.

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The post Baher Azmy on Abu Ghraib Torture Lawsuit, Thomas Germain on Online History Destruction appeared first on FAIR.

“A Global Web of Chinese Propaganda Leads to a US Tech Mogul,” the New York Times (8/5/23) announced on its front page. “The Times unraveled a financial network that stretches from Chicago to Shanghai and uses American nonprofits to push Chinese talking points worldwide,” read the subhead. 

This ostensibly major scoop ran more than 3,000 words and painted a picture of multimillionaire socialist Neville Roy Singham and the activist groups he funds as shady agents of Chinese propaganda. The piece even referenced the Foreign Agents Registration Act, noting that “none of Mr. Singham’s nonprofits have registered under the Foreign Agents Registration Act, as is required of groups that seek to influence public opinion on behalf of foreign powers.”

So it should come as no surprise that the piece has led to a call for a federal investigation into those Singham-funded nonprofits. Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) sent a letter to the Justice Department citing the Times article and arguing that the groups, including the antiwar organization Code Pink and the socialist think tank Tricontinental, “have been receiving direction from the CCP [Communist Party of China].” Rubio concluded, “The CCP is our greatest adversary, and we cannot allow it to abuse our open system to promote its malign influence any longer.” 

‘A socialist benefactor of far-left causes’

To illustrate its article, the Times published a picture of a Code Pink activist holding up a sign with the subversive message, “China is not our enemy.”

But what, exactly, did the Times dig up on Singham and his funded groups? Despite its length, the piece provides no evidence that either the philanthropist himself or the groups he funds are doing anything improper. Instead, the reams of evidence it offers seem to show only that Singham has a pro-China tilt and funds groups that do as well, while the paper repeatedly insinuates that Singham and his associates are secretly Chinese foot soldiers.

The article begins by describing a “street brawl” that “broke out among mostly ethnic Chinese demonstrators” in London in 2019. The Times says “witnesses” blame the incident on a group, No Cold War, that receives funding from Singham and allegedly “attacked activists supporting the democracy movement in Hong Kong.” FAIR could find no reporting substantiating this version of events, but, true or not, it serves to introduce Singham’s world as both anti-democratic and thuggish. 

It quickly adds duplicitous and possibly treasonous to that picture. “On the surface,” the Times writes, No Cold War is a collective of American and British activists “who say the West’s rhetoric against China has distracted from issues like climate change and racial injustice.” But the Times is here to pull back the curtain: 

In fact, a New York Times investigation found, it is part of a lavishly funded influence campaign that defends China and pushes its propaganda. At the center is a charismatic American millionaire, Neville Roy Singham, who is known as a socialist benefactor of far-left causes.

What is less known, and is hidden amid a tangle of nonprofit groups and shell companies, is that Mr. Singham works closely with the Chinese government media machine and is financing its propaganda worldwide.

It all sounds quite illicit, with the lavish funding, the propaganda-pushing and the hiding amidst tangles of shell companies. (The Times uses the word “propaganda” 13 times in its piece, including in the headline.) And this sort of language, which insinuates but never demonstrates wrongdoing, permeates the length of the piece to such a degree that it’s hard to narrow down the examples. For instance, when it reports Singham’s categorical denial that he follows instructions from any foreign government or party, and acts only on his “long-held personal views,” the paper immediately retorts:

But the line between him and the propaganda apparatus is so blurry that he shares office space—and his groups share staff members—with a company whose goal is to educate foreigners about “the miracles that China has created on the world stage.”

The Times accuses Singham of funding news sites around the world that do things like intersperse “articles about land rights with praise for Xi Jinping” or sprinkle “its coverage with Chinese government talking points” or offer “soft coverage of China.” It accuses the groups Singham funds of “sharing one another’s content on social media hundreds of times,” and “interview[ing] one another’s representatives without disclosing their ties.”

A seditious notebook

The article concludes as it began, with a scene meant to cast Singham in a nefarious light:

Just last month, Mr. Singham attended a Chinese Communist Party propaganda forum. In a photo, taken during a breakout session on how to promote the party abroad, Mr. Singham is seen jotting in a notebook adorned with a red hammer and sickle.

In other words: Communist!

If you think China is evil and Communists are the devil—as you might, if you read US corporate news media (FAIR.org, 5/15/20, 4/8/21)—this sounds like important reporting on a dangerous man. The trouble is, there’s nothing illegal about any of this. All the Times succeeds in proving in this article is that Singham puts considerable money, amassed by selling a software company, toward causes that promote positive views of China and are critical of hawkish anti-China foreign policy, which is his right as an US citizen. If you were to replace “China” in this tale with “Ukraine,” it’s hard to imagine the Times assigning a single reporter to the story, let alone putting it on the front page.

But, as Singham is boosting a country vilified rather than lionized in US news media, the Times appears to be doing its best to convey the impression that there’s something deeply problematic about it all. Perhaps the clearest signal of the Times‘ underlying message comes at this moment in the article:

[Singham] and his allies are on the front line of what Communist Party officials call a “smokeless war.” Under the rule of Xi Jinping, China has expanded state media operations, teamed up with overseas outlets and cultivated foreign influencers. The goal is to disguise propaganda as independent content.

The article names many organizations and individuals as being associated in some way with Singham. It even names attendees at his wedding—described as being “also a working event”—including Democracy Now! host Amy Goodman, Ben Cohen of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream, and V, author of The Vagina Monologues. All of these “allies” are implicated by association as soldiers fighting China’s cold war against the US, “foreign influencers,” Trojan horses of Chinese propaganda—no evidence needed other than the company they keep.  

It’s a picture, in short, of treason lurking among the “far left.” 

‘Propaganda trick’

Indeed, many on the left, including those targeted, have accused the Times of McCarthyism. It’s worth remembering the history of the Foreign Agents Registration Act. Enacted in 1938 to address Nazi propaganda, it has in fact rarely been used—no doubt in part because it’s difficult to square with the constitutional right to petition the government and the right to free speech. But it was used in the McCarthy era, most famously to target W.E.B. Du Bois and his Peace Information Center. 

Tricontinental, a think tank named in the Times piece, published an open letter (8/7/23) in response to the article, decrying “McCarthy-like attacks against individuals and organizations criticizing US foreign policy, labeling peace advocates as ‘Chinese or foreign agents.'”

The PIC, a US anti-nuclear group, was connected with international peace movements and published anti-nuclear and pacifist literature from around the world, including the international Stockholm anti-nuclear petition. The Justice Department deemed this a Communist threat to national security and a “propaganda trick,” and indicted Du Bois and four other PIC officers for failing to register as foreign agents. The charges were dismissed by a judge, but they caused the PIC to fold. 

Du Bois later wrote (In Battle for Peace, 1952):

Although the charge was not treason, it was widely understood and said that the Peace Information Center had been discovered to be an agent of Russia…. We were not treated as innocent people whose guilt was to be inquired into, but distinctly as criminals whose innocence was to be proven, which was assumed to be doubtful.

This was abetted by credulous news media coverage at the time (Duke Law Journal, 2/20). The New York Herald Tribune (2/11/51) editorialized that the 

Du Bois outfit was set up to promote a tricky appeal of Soviet origin, poisonous in its surface innocence, which made it appear that a signature against the use of atomic weapons would forthwith insure peace…in short, an attempt to disarm America and yet ignore every form of Communist aggression.

Government use of FARA ramped up again in the wake of accusations of Russian interference in the 2016 elections, but it has primarily been used to target antiwar and international solidarity groups—including the recent indictments of Black liberation activists (Nation, 4/25/23).

Regarding Singham and his “allies,” the Times reported that the FARA “usually applies to groups taking money or orders from foreign governments. Legal experts said Mr. Singham’s network was an unusual case.”

It is certainly unusual in the sense that it’s hard to construe it as a FARA case. It’s not unusual, unfortunately, in the sense that US news media are prone to engage in character assassination of those who sympathize with official enemies.

Research assistance: Brandon Warner

The post NYT Reveals That a Tech Mogul Likes China—and That McCarthyism Is Alive and Well appeared first on FAIR.

 

The legal director of the Kansas ACLU called the action against Eric Meyer’s Marion County Record “one of the most aggressive police raids of a news organization or entity in quite some time” (AP, 8/13/23).

As the police raided Marion County Record editor and publisher Eric Meyer’s home August 11 (Committee to Protect Journalists, 8/12/23; AP, 8/13/23; New York Times, 8/13/23), his 98-year-old mother was aghast, watching the cops rummage through her things. “She was very upset, yelling about ‘Gestapo tactics’ and ‘where are all the good people?’” Meyer told FAIR. He said that after the raid she “was beside herself, she wouldn’t eat, she couldn’t sleep and finally went to bed about sunrise.” Meyer’s mother, a co-owner of the paper, eventually told her son that the whole affair was “going to be the death of me.”

And it was. She died the next afternoon. And Meyer blames the police (Daily Beast, 8/12/23).

By that afternoon, Meyer had been fielding calls all day with lawyers and journalists, as the raid on the paper’s offices and his home suddenly made his small-town Kansas paper world-famous. He spoke to FAIR from his office line, because his cellphone had been seized, along with other equipment.

The raid was “authorized by a search warrant that alleged identity theft and unlawful use of a computer,” the Guardian (8/12/23) reported, leading authorities to take “publishing and reporting materials that the newspaper relied on to publish their next edition.”

The reason, according to news reports, seems fairly petty, sparked by the complaints of  local restaurateur Kari Newell, who had demanded that Meyer and a reporter be removed from an event with area Congressmember Jake LaTurner (R.-Kansas). She alleged later that the paper had unlawfully obtained personal records showing that she, according to the Guardian, had allegedly been “convicted of drink-driving and continued using her vehicle without a license,” but that “the paper never published anything related to it.”

But that’s not what Meyer thinks this is really about. Meyer explained that current town police chief Gideon Cody—a retiree of the Kansas City, Missouri, police department—has harbored animosity toward the paper ever since it started asking uncomfortable questions about his hiring (Handbasket, 8/12/23; Washington Post, 8/13/23). Meyer’s paper, after hearing anonymous allegations about his tenure, questioned town leaders as to whether they vetted Cody before hiring him (the paper never published any of the allegations, Meyer said). This led to a confrontation between the paper and the chief, and Meyer believes that the restaurateur’s antics were merely an excuse to exert power over the paper.

Silencing critical journalism

A local restaurant owner who was a subject of the Record‘s reporting (8/9/23) was cited in the search warrant that authorized the newsroom raid.

When an anti-corruption newspaper in Guatemala gets shut down and its publisher is thrown in jail (Washington Post, 5/15/23), or a Hong Kong publisher known for opposing the expanding powers of police is imprisoned (AP, 10/25/22), Americans might be outraged but figure that these are the tribulations of less open and democratic societies. The Marion County Record case is a reminder that the United States is no stranger to local powers using their authority to silence what is left of critical journalism.

Consider how officials in Delaware County in the Catskills region of New York reacted to the critical reporting of a local paper, the Reporter. “The county stripped the newspaper of a lucrative contract to print public notices,” the New York Times (6/18/23) reported, noting that the county admitted to the Reporter that the “decision was partly based on ‘the manner in which your paper reports county business.’” This hit the paper where it hurts, as the “move cost the Reporter about $13,000 a year in revenue.” This kind of retaliation has occurred in several states, the Times said.

Missouri has seen several attempts to intimidate or impede journalists. In St. Louis, a judge forbade “the St. Louis Post-Dispatch from publishing material from the mental health evaluation of a man accused of killing a police officer” (Riverfront Times, 5/25/23), an apparently unconstitutional prior restraint on the press. Missouri’s then-Attorney General Eric Schmitt, now a Republican senator, “filed a request in June [2022] asking for three years of emails sent and received by…professors while they worked at the Columbia Missourian” (AP, 9/2/22), a clear intimidation tactic towards journalists whose publications are attached to public universities. The state’s governor also pursued a criminal investigation into a Post-Dispatch reporter who found security breaches on a government website, although no charges were ultimately filed (USA Today, 2/12/22).

The city of Los Angeles sued both a Knock LA reporter and a police accountability group for publishing information about Los Angeles Police Department officers (KTLA, 4/6/23); the LA Times (5/7/23) and other outlets came to the reporter and group’s defense.

And FAIR has covered the prosecution (and an eventual acquittal) of a Des Moines Register reporter who was covering a Black Lives Matter protest (FAIR.org, 3/16/21), and the trespassing convictions of two Asheville Blade reporters who were covering the police clearing of a homeless encampment (FAIR.org, 6/8/23).

National bad examples

New York Times (6/18/23): “Retaliation…appears to be occurring more frequently now, when terms like ‘fake news’ have become part of the popular lexicon.”

Officials rationalize many of these actions against news outlets by the fact that journalists received information or witnessed something they weren’t supposed to. But that is, in fact, what journalism is. The point of reporting is not to rewrite press releases or glue official statements together, but to cultivate a trusted network of sources within government agencies, businesses, civic organizations and other halls of power who pass on the real story because the public deserves to hear it.

Meyer sees the raid on his paper as part of the current moment when “respect for the media is at an all time low.” A lot of that has to do with Trumpism’s hatred of a free press and the branding of all journalistic criticism as “fake news”; Republican voters now use Nazi phrases to attack the free press (Time, 10/25/16) and even attack reporters physically (Guardian, 5/24/17). Trump’s election was followed by a spate of assaults on journalists who had the temerity to ask questions of elected officials and politicians (FAIR.org, 5/25/17).

But this sentiment within state power predates the Trump administration. The “War on Terror” gave the second Bush administration an excuse to threaten whistleblowers, and  the Obama administration escalated those threats into prosecutions of leakers (Extra!, 9/11). Corporate media often took the side of the government when it silenced leaks to protect state power, especially after Edward Snowden revealed evidence of widespread National Security Agency spying on the US public (FAIR.org, 10/6/16).

It might seem quaint to equate the predicament of the Marion County Record with the case against Wikileaks founder Julian Assange (New York Times, 12/21/20), whose reporting based on Chelsea Manning’s leak exposed potential US war crimes. But the Kansas case shouldn’t be dismissed as provincial. Small local newspapers really are the main source challenging the sheriffs, county executives and business leaders who call the shots in a great deal of the United States.

As the Kansas City Star (8/12/23) said, Meyer and the rest of his paper “represent one of the green shoots sprouting in a nation of expanding news deserts.” They are the “watchdogs of communities too small or too remote to attract the attention of big metropolitan dailies or TV stations.”

The urge to silence high-level, national security leakers like Snowden or Manning is the same impulse that led a police raid into Meyer’s home and his paper’s office. And the ability of police in prominent news settings like Washington, DC, to arrest journalists for covering protests without provoking widespread condemnation from media power centers (FAIR.org, 9/26/17) sends a signal to authorities in less-visible venues that critics in the press are fair game. The temptation to swat the gadfly is so powerful at every level that journalists and press advocates have to constantly fight to keep from losing ground.

Meyer is doing just that, and promises to bring litigation. “We’re suing, not to get our stuff back. We want it back, but it’s not crucial,” he told FAIR, noting that this fight was about principles. “The big thing is, I don’t want to set a precedent and fold on this.” He added, “I don’t want anyone to go through this crap.”

When asked what he hopes will come out of this case, he laughed and said, “I’d like to see some people lose their jobs.”

Featured Image: Police raiding the offices of the Marion County Record (via CBS News, 8/14/23).

The post Raid on Kansas Paper Shows Perilous State of Free Press appeared first on FAIR.

 

Vox (8/7/23) should admit that student loan cancellation would be a costly policy for some of its writer’s funders.

Vox (8/7/23) published a piece arguing that “the White House should admit that student debt forgiveness isn’t happening,” and instead make sure that borrowers are prepared for loan repayments to begin again in October. But it failed to disclose that the author is on the student loan industry’s payroll.

The Debt Collective, the nation’s first debtor’s union, noted on Twitter (8/7/23) that the author, Kevin Carey, works for a corporate-backed think tank funded in part by the student loan industry, and has worked to undermine student debt cancellation for over a decade.

As a result, Carey’s argument that cancellation is futile, and that the White House’s efforts should be focused on helping students restart payments and avoid delinquency, reeks of feigned sympathy. It calls to mind the white moderate from MLK’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” who despite claiming to support the civil rights movement, “paternalistically” advised African Americans to wait for a “more convenient season” to achieve them.

Don’t try to cancel

New America’s Kevin Carey

Carey praises the White House’s new income-driven repayment plan, but claims that in order to connect these services with the millions of borrowers who may not know their payments have restarted, the Biden Administration must end its flirtation with cancellation, which he argues diverts focus and represents a “confused” communications strategy.

Making sure borrowers know what their repayment options are is a worthy cause, but at no point does Carey provide any real evidence that these two goals are incongruous. Instead, the article is riddled with phrases emphasizing the need for an “all-out effort” and “relentless focus,” seemingly hoping to convince the reader through repetition that trying to cancel student debt would be a hopeless distraction.

In reality, given the current circumstances, an “all-out effort” to help student borrowers would look more like what the Biden administration is doing, and what borrowers and advocates say they want, and less like what the creditor shill is asking for. Hence the multi-faceted approach.

Carey states that the Debt Collective is “actively discouraging their many followers from enrolling in repayment plans.” This is false. Instead, what advocates like the Debt Collective object to is taking tools off the table that help borrowers, like cancellation, especially given the rarity of an administration open to canceling student debt.

Obvious conflict of interest

Washingtonian (6/24/18) reported that when New America’s Barry Lynn was organizing a conference on corporate concentration, his boss Anne-Marie Slaughter complained, “Just THINK how you are imperiling funding for others.”

Carey is vice president of “education policy and knowledge management” at New America, and director of the think tank’s Education Center. The group is noted for its coziness with its corporate sponsors (Washingtonian, 6/24/18)–once firing a researcher, Barry Lynn, after he publicly criticized Google, a major donor. “We’re an organization that develops relationships with funders,” CEO Anne-Marie Slaughter told staffers by way of explaining his termination.

As the Debt Collective highlighted on Twitter, another one of New America’s funders is the ECMC Foundation, the nonprofit branch of the Educational Credit Management Corporation–a debt collector for the Education Department. Another funder is the Lumina Foundation, whose deep pockets originate from the student loan industry.

That Carey’s job is funded by corporations that stand to lose so much from Biden’s cancellation of federal student loans deserves a disclosure from Vox. Instead, the closest readers get is Casey noting that when asked for comment, a loan cancellation activist told him to “shill for student loan companies elsewhere”—followed by his ludicrous rebuttal that student loan companies “haven’t made federal student loans since 2010.”

This is perhaps supposed to absolve Carey of having a vested interest in payments restarting. But this is not the same as saying that these corporations don’t make money off these loans, which they do when they collect them. ECMC in particular has a well-documented history of using “ruthless” tactics for collecting loans (New York Times, 1/1/14; Mother Jones, 8/23).

It’s no surprise, then, that the main thrust of Carey’s argument, that the White House cannot walk and chew gum at the same time—that it can’t both help student borrowers avoid delinquency when payments restart in October and pursue its Plan B strategy to get debt cancellation through the Supreme Court—is exactly what ECMC and Lumina would be hoping for.

To not only neglect to disclose this obvious conflict of interest but to instead obfuscate and pretend it couldn’t exist—all in the name of preventing student borrowers from much needed relief—is a failure of the highest order. As the Debt Collective tweeted, “Kevin Carey knows who butters his bread, and he writes as ‘a student loan expert’ for Vox promoting the status quo.”

ACTION ALERT: You can send messages to Vox here (or via Twitter: @voxdotcom). Please remember that respectful communication is the most effective. Feel free to leave a copy of your message in the comments thread.

The post Vox’s Student Loan ‘Expert’ Is Paid by Debt Collectors appeared first on FAIR.

Janine Jackson interviewed the Lever‘s Matthew Cunningham-Cook about Republican Party climate sabotage for the August 4, 2023, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

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Janine Jackson: Listeners may have encountered some variant of the statement attributed to labor organizer and folk singer Utah Phillips that says, “The Earth is not dying, it is being killed, and those who are killing it have names and addresses.”

It’s cited because it’s powerful, and its power derives in part from the fact that it goes against the pervasive discourse, certainly of corporate news media, that things are bad, even scary bad, even unprecedentedly, hard-to-imagine bad. But the point is, you know, progress happens, and getting angry doesn’t help, and disrupting things, well, that’s criminal as well as misguided. And then, what’s that? Things are getting worse? Well, that’s another story for another day.

There are myriad things that account for climate disruption and for its devastating and disparate effects. But the top-down resistance to naming the obstacles to a safer world is an important one, and one in which news media play a big role.

Our guest is one of those working to fill that void. Matthew Cunningham-Cook covers a range of issues for the Lever. He’s also written for Labor Notes, Public Employee Press and Al Jazeera America, among other outlets. He joins us now by phone from Costa Rica. Welcome to CounterSpin, Matthew Cunningham-Cook.

Matthew Cunningham-Cook: Thanks so much for having me on, Janine. I appreciate it.

JJ: The latest, the last I checked, is that a crucial Atlantic Ocean circulation system, that’s a cornerstone of global climate, may collapse as quickly as two years from now. Though as Julie Hollar wrote for FAIR.org, that wasn’t enough to get it on everybody’s front page.

But truly, there is no need to cite any indicators here. Anybody who believes in science and their sensory organs knows that bad things are happening and more are on the horizon, and that there are things that we can do besides throwing up our hands and saying, it is what it is.

Lever (7/25/23)

So tell us about your recent story that tells us that there are things stepping between what people want and what is reflected in policy.

MCC: We just took a look at the latest funding bills that are winding their way through the House right now, and the different insane aspects that Republicans have added.

There’s one particular component that’s extremely egregious, that bans research on climate change’s impact on fisheries. And this is while traditionally Republican states like Alaska are dealing with the collapse of their fisheries, currently.

There’s requiring that the Biden administration issue these offshore oil/gas leases, that slows down wind power leases, and that defunds the US’s very limited responsibilities under the Paris Climate Accords.

It’s a full-on assault on basic reason, and how we respond to the climate crisis. And what we do at the Lever that is not typically replicated in the corporate media is we just line up the policy with the campaign contributions from the oil and gas industry. So the members of Congress who are championing these draconian assaults on basic climate science receive hundreds of thousands of dollars in campaign contributions from the oil and gas industry.

And you really don’t see this in the New York Times or the Washington Post. If they do report on these types of developments, it’s usually separated from basic questions like campaign finance, which is clearly what drives these proposed changes more than anything else.

So that’s what we did, and it’s a depressing story, for sure. What we’re hoping to do is ultimately shame the corporate media into doing more reporting like this that directly lines up policy with campaign contributions. Because if you’re reporting these two issues separately, the public is just not getting the full picture.

JJ: Absolutely. And folks are misunderstanding the disconnect, because media will do a story about the way the public feels about climate disruption, or about just the horrors of climate disruption. But, as you say, it’s going to be on a separate page than a story about campaign finance, as though it’s not a direct line from A to B.

And I want to point out: Part of what’s key about the piece that you wrote is these are not things that Republicans are putting forward, this idea of supporting bad things and also preventing responsive things; they aren’t introducing them as legislation that people can look at and think about. They’re sneaking them in, right?

Lever (9/27/22)

MCC: Yeah. It’s just these small components of appropriations bills that nobody is paying attention to that, yeah, have very meaningful consequences.

One of the most important actions that the Biden administration has started to take is this Climate Disclosure Rule, which just seems so basic, which is that publicly traded companies have these massive climate risks. They should disclose those risks to their investors. And it hasn’t happened yet, and it’s been attacked by both Republicans and so-called Democrats like Joe Manchin alike.

But this is a critical step forward for the public to be able to get information about how the nation’s largest corporations are poisoning our environment, and how it not only hurts the public, but also their own investors, which includes the pension funds and retirement accounts of tens of millions of Americans.

It’s not like they’re trying to say, “Oh, let’s pass an independent piece of legislation that bars the SEC from issuing this climate rule,” because it would never pass. Instead, they’re inserting it into the appropriations process.

And it also underscores just how much more ideologically committed Republicans are than Democrats. You very rarely see Democrats, when they control Congress, trying to use the appropriations process to expand the federal government’s ability to respond to climate change, or expand labor rights. No, it’s something that Republicans do, the opposite, foreclosing actions on the environment or on labor rights.

JJ: And then elite media come in and say, “Can’t we all just be civil,” and introduce the idea that there should be kind of a peacemaking between an overtly ideological and rule-bending (to be generous) party, and another that says, “Oh, well no, that’s not a thing that we would do.” It’s like bringing a knife to a gunfight.

And I guess the least that we would ask of media is that they at least just call it that way. At least describe it that way, instead of making it seem like it’s a balance.

Matthew Cunningham-Cook: “”That we should let climate change go unaddressed until the human race goes extinct…is a cornerstone of the Republican Party’s agenda.”

MCC: And, to be clear, Democrats like Henry Cuellar receive hundreds of thousands of dollars from the oil and gas industry. He’s on the Appropriations Committee, and I’m sure he is enabling Republicans left and right.

There is bipartisan commitment to letting the planet burn, but it’s not a cornerstone of the Democratic Party’s ideology that we should let climate change go unaddressed until the human race goes extinct. That is a cornerstone of the Republican Party’s agenda, and we’re not seeing that reported.

JJ: Thank you. And let me just say, that’s where I see the Lever and Popular Information and a bunch of other outlets coming in, just to say to folks, at a baseline level, that, yes, there actually is a disconnect between what the public wants and is calling for, and what we see coming out of Congress, that there actually are obstacles there. I think we would like all journalism to play that role, but it’s good that independent journalism is stepping up.

MCC: Yeah, I agree. Yes. That’s why we started. That’s why we do the work we do, is we saw this gaping hole, and we’re working at it. Sometimes it’s not easy, but we’re just trying to get the message out there.

JJ: We’ve been speaking with reporter Matthew Cunningham-Cook. You can find his recent piece, “The GOP Is Quietly Adding Climate Denial to Government Spending Bills,” co-authored with David Sirota, online at LeverNews.com. Thank you so much, Matthew Cunningham-Cook for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

MCC: Thanks so much, Janine. I appreciate it.

 

The post ‘We Line Up Policy With Campaign Contributions From Oil and Gas’ appeared first on FAIR.

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New York Times (8/6/23)

This week on CounterSpin: Why was Detroit mother Porcha Woodruff, eight months pregnant, arrested and held 11 hours by police accusing her of robbery and carjacking? Because Woodruff was identified as a suspect based on facial recognition technology. The Wayne County prosecutor still contends that Woodruff’s charges—dismissed a month later—were “appropriate based upon the facts.” Those “facts” increasingly involve the use of technology that has been proven wrong; the New York Times report on Woodruff helpfully links to articles like “Another Arrest and Jail Time, Due to a Bad Facial Recognition Match,” and “Wrongfully Accused by an Algorithm.” And it’s especially wrong when it comes to—get ready to be surprised—Black people.

Facial recognition has been deemed harmful, in principle and in practice, for years now. We talked in February 2019 with Shankar Narayan, director of the Technology and Liberty Project at the ACLU of Washington state.  We hear that conversation this week.

Transcript:  ‘Face Surveillance Is a Uniquely Dangerous Technology’

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Newsweek (8/7/23)

Also on the show: Listeners may know a federal court has at least for now blocked Biden administration efforts to forgive the debt of student borrowers whose colleges lied to them or suddenly disappeared. The White House seems to be looking for ways to ease student loan debt more broadly, but not really presenting an unapologetic, coherent picture of why, and what the impacts would be. We talked about that with Braxton Brewington of the Debt Collective in March 2022. We’ll revisit that conversation today as well.

Transcript: ‘Student Debt Hurts the Economy and Cancellation Will Improve Lives’

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

The post Shankar Narayan on Facial Misrecognition, Braxton Brewington on Student Debt Abolition appeared first on FAIR.