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They tried. Oh, did the media try.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The paper continued:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lach continued:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

MarketWatch (3/7/25)

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

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

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

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

LaToya Parker: Thank you so much for having me.

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

OtherWords (5/28/25)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

LP: Absolutely. Absolutely.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

LP: Thank you again for having me.

Column (6/22/25)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CBS (6/7/25)

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

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

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

Michael Galant: Thanks so much for having me.

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

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

CEPR (3/3/25)

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

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

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

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

JJ: Please.

CEPR (9/25/23)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

New York Times (6/16/17)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

MG: Thank you.

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

Zeteo (6/12/25)

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

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

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

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

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

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

CBS (6/13/25)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Guardian (3/13/25)

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

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

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

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

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

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

JJ: Your presence, OK.

Al Jazeera (3/23/25)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CG: Thank you for having me back.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Media Cloud analysis of New York Democratic mayoral primary coverage.

Maisie Williams as Arya Stark from Game of Thrones.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The New York Times (6/18/25) made clear that it wouldn’t mind an unprovoked attack on Iran—so long as it wasn’t done hastily.

In the wake of the US-supported Israeli attack on Iran, and days before the direct US bombing that followed, the New York Times editorial board (6/18/25) argued that “America Must Not Rush Into a War Against Iran.”

This language was as shifty as it was deliberate. Rather than oppose a policy of unprovoked aggression and mass murder, the Times editorialists suggested such a campaign was happening too hastily, and it should be preceded by more debate.

The opinion writers at the most important paper in the world were fully in favor of attacking Iran; they only worried that Trump would go about it the wrong way. In fact, the Times’ justification for war was identical to that of the Trump administration’s explanation after the fact.  It laid it out in the first paragraph:

A nuclear-armed Iran would make the world less safe. It would destabilize the already volatile Middle East. It could imperil Israel’s existence. It would encourage other nations to acquire their own nuclear weapons, with far-reaching geopolitical consequences.

The New York Times‘ echo of the standard Israeli and US propaganda line offers an opportunity to critically examine this most recent justification for aggressive war.

The Trump administration’s top intelligence official saying that “Iran is not building a nuclear weapon” (Responsible Statecraft, 6/8/25) did not prevent the New York Times from asserting that Iran “has made substantial progress toward acquiring a nuclear weapon.”

The premise here was that Iran is working to build a nuclear weapon, something that forms the backbone of the Israeli propaganda campaign justifying their actions. The only problem is that there is no evidence whatsoever for this position. Not only is there no evidence that Iran is building a nuclear weapon, there is no reason to think that if they did, they would be anything other than defensive weapons.

Nowhere in the Times analysis was there any reference to the fact that neither US intelligence agencies nor international monitoring organizations have found evidence of any Iranian intention to build a nuclear weapon. As recently as March 25, 2025, Tulsi Gabbard, the Trump administration’s director of national intelligence, told the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence that the US intelligence community “continues to assess that Iran is not building a nuclear weapon and Supreme Leader Khamenei has not authorized the nuclear weapons program that he suspended in 2003.”

While the International Atomic Energy Agency has been critical of steps Iran has taken to make its nuclear power program less transparent in the context of continual threats from Israel and the US to bomb that program, IAEA director Rafael Grossi emphasized in an interview with CNN (6/17/25; cited in Al Jazeera, 6/18/25), after those threats had become reality, “We did not have any proof of a systematic effort to move into a nuclear weapon.”

“The Trump administration might well be able to achieve a stricter deal” than the one Obama negotiated in 2015, the Times advised—without mentioning that Trump’s unilateral repudiated the Obama deal (New York Times, 5/8/18).

While the Times editorial did make brief mention of the US’s Obama-era anti-nuclear treaty with Iran, it offered no analysis as to why the Trump administration unilaterally scrapped the deal, despite no violation on Iran’s part. Nor did the paper mention the Biden administration refusal to negotiate a return to the deal. There was no mention of the fact that as Israel launched its first strike against Iran, the Iranians had made it clear that they wished to make a deal with the Trump administration on its nuclear energy program, and were actively negotiating toward that end.

But the fact is that every country in the Middle East, including Iran, has been in favor of a nuclear weapons–free Middle East. Every country, that is, with the exception of Israel, whose illegal, undeclared and often unacknowledged stockpile of nuclear weapons are currently in the hands of a genocidal and messianic regime, hell-bent on attacking its neighbors and thwarting any opportunities for peace.

Despite all of the fearmongering about Iran’s alleged aggressive intent and destabilizing potential, the Times ignored ample analysis and evidence to the contrary. As eminent political scientist John Mearsheimer (PBS, 7/9/12) has argued, a nuclear armed Iran could make the region more stable, because of the deterrent power of nuclear weapons.

A 2009 US military–funded study from the RAND corporation (4/14/09) examined Iranian ”press statements, writings in military journals, and other glimpses into Iranian thinking,” and found that it was extremely unlikely that Iran would use nuclear weapons offensively against Israel. Contrary to the Times’ image of Iran as fanatical theocrats bent on Israel’s destruction at all costs, military planners in Iran are well aware of the danger of being wiped off the map by retaliatory US strikes, and plan accordingly. If the Islamic Republic was to get nuclear weapons, predicts RAND, they would be used to deter exactly the kind of unprovoked attack that the US and Israel have launched over the past several days. They would be defensive, not offensive, weapons.

The IAEA statement cited by the New York Times was the product of intense lobbying by the US (Common Dreams, 6/23/25).

The editorial board explicitly avoided the question of what Congress should do on the question of war with Iran: “The separate question of whether the United States should join the conflict is not one that we are addressing here.” But they had no problem presenting their pros list:

We know the arguments in favor of doing so—namely, that Iran’s government is a malevolent force in the world, and that it has made substantial progress toward acquiring a nuclear weapon. Last week the International Atomic Energy Agency, which is part of the United Nations, declared that Iran was violating its nonproliferation obligations and apparently hiding evidence of its efforts.

And their cons list:

Given how much weaker Iran is today than it was then, thanks partly to Israel’s humbling of Iranian proxies like Hamas and Hezbollah, the Trump administration might well be able to achieve a stricter [Iran nuclear deal] today.

While the Times correctly pointed out that the IAEA found Iran to be in “noncompliance” with the nonproliferation treaty (NPT), the Times failed to point out that this came after an intense lobbying effort from Western officials just hours before Israeli strikes. They also ignore Iran’s detailed criticism of the IAEA finding, including its allegations that the findings were based in part on forged documents—a credible allegation, given Israel’s history of fabricating and forging evidence to justify aggression. Iran also noted that some of the “nonproliferation obligations” it had allegedly violated were not codified in the NPT, but instead were part of the agreement that the US unilaterally withdrew from. Nor did the Times make reference to the IAEA chief’s explicit insistence that the agency did not have proof Iran was trying to build a nuclear weapon.

Shortly after Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said the bombing of Iran “was not and has not been about regime change” (BBC, 6/23/25), Trump posted, “Why wouldn’t there be a regime change???”

Instead of explaining this, the Times went straight to name-calling. One does not have to scrape the annals of the New York Times to predict that the phrase “malevolent force” has never been used to describe any of Washington’s ultra-violent allies, even the ones who have actually built and maintained an illegal stockpile of nuclear weapons. Certainly not Israel, the nation that has put an entire population under military apartheid for decades, and has slaughtered tens of thousands as part of what international rights organizations have labeled a genocide.

The US and Israel have made Iran the target of propaganda campaigns, terrorism, cyber attacks, assassinations, regime change operations and unprovoked attacks on its personnel and home soil. If the Times had included these facts, it would have inhibited the ultimate goal of the editorial: to promote the idea that war with Iran could potentially be desirable—and certainly justifiable. The Times seemed keen to act as a loyal opposition to Trump, while distancing themselves from the manner in which he might enact such a war.

Including the facts of America’s aggressive and provocative behavior against Iran would force them to conclude that the primary force destabilizing the region is not Iran, but the US and Israel. It isn’t Iran whose top papers are weighing the benefits of whether or not to launch a war of aggression against yet another nation. That honor goes to the New York Times, which said of this national discussion of mass murder policy: “Let this vital debate begin.”

After the strikes on Iran, the Trump administration and Israel have not announced full scale regime change war just yet, though there is every indication that such plans are in the works. As with Iraq in 2003, we have seen how easily false claims of weapons of mass destruction, and propaganda about a need to act, can morph into a years-long quagmire of senseless killing in the name of rebuilding a nation according to Washington’s designs. If such a war should be launched against Iran, the Times will have been one of its key supporters.

Research assistance: Emma Llano

ACTION ALERT: You can send a message to the New York Times at [email protected] or via Bluesky: @NYTimes.com. Please remember that respectful communication is the most effective. Feel free to leave a copy of your message in the comments thread here.

Janine Jackson interviewed Cal Poly Pomona’s Farrah Hassen about criminalizing homelessness for the June 12, 2025, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

Former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani

Janine Jackson: In 1999, then–New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani declared that “streets do not exist in civilized societies for the purpose of people sleeping there. Bedrooms are for sleeping.” He added that the right to sleep on the streets “doesn’t exist anywhere. The Founding Fathers never put that in the Constitution.”

That absurd out-of-touchness, the failure, not merely of empathy, but of knowledge? Our guest reports that still seems to undergird much of what we are told are policies and laws meant to address homelessness, including at the highest levels.

Farrah Hassen has been tracking the issue for years. She’s a writer, policy analyst and adjunct professor in the Department of Political Science at Cal Poly Pomona. She joins us now by phone from Sacramento. Welcome to CounterSpin, Farrah Hassen.

Farrah Hassen: Hi, Janine. Thanks for having me.

Other Words (6/4/25)

JJ: I want to ask you about Grants Pass v. Johnson, last year’s Supreme Court case that you wrote about recently for OtherWords, but I’d like to start, as you do, with the acknowledgement that ought to anchor every story we see: that a person who works full time and earns a minimum wage cannot afford a safe place to live almost anywhere in the United States. That’s the reality, that’s the understanding that any of our responses ought to take on board, or to be judged by, yes?

FH: That’s correct. I mean, we have to consider that backdrop if we are going to talk about the growing problem of homelessness, and the related housing crisis. And, unsurprisingly, homelessness has increased as our government has diminished social safety nets. And we have to consider that when we think about how people fall into homelessness.

JJ: So rather than respond with a commitment to housing and social services, and job and wage growth, what we’ve seen is criminalizing. I couldn’t find it, but I remember Rudy Giuliani saying that he hoped that his crackdown on unhoused people would lead to them just going away, just sort of disappearing. And that seems to be some of the thinking behind, if not the Grants Pass ruling, some of the support for it. So tell listeners a little about what Grants Pass, that decision, did, and then, what didn’t it do?

FH: A year ago, on June 28, in the City of Grants Pass v. Johnson, the Supreme Court ruled that local governments can criminalize people for sleeping outside, even if there is no available shelter. The Supreme Court overturned the 2018 Martin v. Boise precedent that had been decided by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, which had said that the Eighth Amendment’s “cruel and unusual punishment” clause prohibits cities from penalizing unhoused people for sitting, sleeping or lying outside on public property unless they have access to adequate temporary shelter.

And so, for some context, in Grants Pass, like other cities across the United States, the number of people living unhoused easily exceeds the number of available shelter on any given night. Debra Blake was among those Grants Pass residents who were forced to live outside—in her case, for eight years—after losing her job and housing. Moreover, her disability disqualified her from staying in the town’s only shelter. And the city had these anti-camping ordinances that prohibited people like Debra Blake from sleeping or camping in the public, and they interpreted “camping” to even include the use of bedding, like a blanket, to stay warm in the cold.

Anyone who violated these ordinances in the city could be ticketed, could face fines, even subject to criminal prosecution. And the Grants Pass City Council themselves revealed that the underlying goal of these ordinances was to “make it uncomfortable enough for unhoused people in our city so they will want to move down the road.”

Cal Matters (2/27/25)

And so in Debra Blake’s case, after being banished from every park, accruing thousands in fines, she sued the city of Grants Pass as part of this class action suit, for violating unhoused residents’ constitutional rights. And the Oregon District Court agreed in 2020 that the city’s actions constituted cruel and unusual punishment.

But, sadly, Blake never got to see the results. And the city of Grants Pass ended up appealing this decision all the way to the Supreme Court, which ruled in the city’s favor.

And which brings us back to today. And I should also note, going back to the Supreme Court’s decision, that, importantly, it did not say, “Therefore, state and local governments must now criminalize homelessness.” But because the high court found Grants Pass’s anti-camping ordinances constitutional, many jurisdictions, unfortunately, including in California where I live, have used the court’s decision as a green light to crack down on people living unhoused, including by passing these “anti-camping ordinances,” similar to Grants Pass, which broadly criminalized the act of sleeping or pitching tents or other structures on publicly owned property.

JJ: It’s clear that the issues of homelessness involve many societal factors other than housing. And, at the same time, there’s an Occam’s razor at work here. There’s a reason that “housing first” lands as a call, isn’t there? For people who think, “Well, it’s very complicated. It’s about mental health, it’s about family structure” or whatever, housing first makes a lot of sense, if folks would just think of it that way, yeah?

Benioff Homelessness and Housing Initiative (6/23)

FH: That’s absolutely correct. There is a misconception that homelessness is primarily caused by addiction and mental illness—which is not to say, to be clear, that there are not people suffering from mental illness and addiction among our nation’s unhoused population.

But there was this landmark study in June 2023 by the University of California San Francisco that focused on California, and it found that poverty and high housing costs are, in fact, the driving forces of homelessness. And that’s just more confirmation that housing unaffordability is the primary cause of homelessness, as other research and experts have long noted.

And that’s why, therefore, using the findings of this evidence, punitive fines, arrests, sweeps of encampments do not address the root of the problem, which is, again, the absence of permanent, affordable and, I might add, adequate housing. And so there are more things our country can do instead of criminalizing homelessness, which only traps people into these cycles, these endless cycles of poverty and homelessness, not to mention criminal penalties being inhumane to begin with.

And so housing first, as you mentioned, is one proven, evidence-backed solution here. It prioritizes providing permanent housing as soon as possible to individuals and families experiencing homelessness, without preconditions. It’s in contrast to what some people want, which is treatment first, or treatment only. Housing first also is coupled with voluntary supportive services to help improve housing stability and well-being, especially for those people who may need additional support, additional treatment.

And housing first has had strong bipartisan support for decades. It’s been supported by the Department of Housing and Urban Development and other agencies. And there’s so much evidence that shows that housing first actually works, including in places like Houston, Texas, which notably reduced homelessness by nearly two thirds over a decade. So that’s just yet another example of why, instead of kicking people while they’re down, housing support, combined with other voluntary services, really helped to lift people back up.

JJ: I’ll just only ask you, finally, Farrah Hassen, if you see a particular role for news media here, either for good or for ill, in terms of consideration of this question, which I want to ground folks in the statement that you have in the piece, “Homelessness is solvable in our lifetime.” It’s not bending laws of nature, it’s just informed effort. And I wonder what role you think news media might play there.

Farrah Hassen: “We have to look at this as a government failure, instead of constantly pointing back at people living unhoused, and blaming them for their plight.”

FH: Oh, thank you. I really do appreciate that question, because underlying that question is, I believe, a larger narrative of how we talk about housing in this country. And you would never know that it’s actually a well-defined and internationally protected fundamental human right that all people—not people who have to be means-tested, or meet certain qualifications—all people are entitled to. Why? Because we all know innately, looking at our own lives, that housing is essential to life, to health, to well-being, but in the United States, it has primarily treated housing as a commodity, and it’s failing to protect this right for large numbers of people.

Homelessness itself, the sheer fact that over 770,000 people last year experienced homelessness, a record high, directly violates this right to adequate housing. So we have to look at this as a government failure, instead of constantly pointing back at people living unhoused, and blaming them for their plight, as if there are not larger structural factors at play that contribute to housing remaining perpetually unaffordable for more and more people living in this country.

And so obviously the US doesn’t recognize housing as a human right, but I believe we should talk about it more, like we do about the need for Medicare for All, which is rooted in healthcare for all. We need these economic, social and cultural rights, along with civil and political rights, to really be able to live our lives to the fullest. And, fundamentally, that means transforming our nation’s approach to housing policies, and to remember that people shouldn’t be punished as well, as we look back on homelessness, for living in public spaces. People should not be punished for existing.

JJ: I’m going to end on that note. We’ve been speaking with writer, policy analyst and adjunct professor at Cal Poly Pomona Farrah Hassen. Thank you so much for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

FH: Thanks so much, Janine.

After citing Trump administration charges that Kilmar Abrego Garcia was a member of MS-13, Al Jazeera (6/6/25) included a response from his advocates: “His lawyers have denied that he was a gang member and said he had not been convicted of any crime.”

Kilmar Abrego Garcia was returned to the United States on June 6, after being wrongly deported to El Salvador almost three months earlier. Abrego Garcia had been detained in El Salvador’s Terrorism Confinement Center since March 15, along with more than 250 other immigrants accused of belonging to the Latin American gangs Tren de Aragua and MS-13.

Abrego Garcia’s case drew particular media attention, due to the admission by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) that his deportation and subsequent imprisonment were a result of an “administrative error.” For weeks, however, both the Trump administration and the Salvadoran government insisted they were powerless to return Abrego Garcia to the United States.

After months of protests from Abrego Garcia’s Maryland community and legal challenges from his lawyers, the father of three was finally returned to the US. But there was a caveat: He would face criminal charges related to an immigrant-smuggling operation that the Department of Justice alleges Abrego Garcia took part in as a member of MS-13.

Though there are plenty of reasons to cast doubt on the charges made against Abrego Garcia, in the seven articles published in the wake of his return, the New York Times (6/6/25, 6/6/25, 6/6/25, 6/8/25) and Wall Street Journal (6/6/25, 6/7/25, 6/8/25) present them mostly at face value. Given that the publications are the top two largest newspapers in America, their deficient coverage of one of the most important immigration cases of the second Trump administration is noteworthy.

The main New York Times story (6/6/25) on Kilmar Abrego Garcia’s return from El Salvador consists largely of Trump administration officials accusing him of crimes—with no quotes from Abrego Garcia’s lawyers contesting those charges. 

Only two of the articles (New York Times, 6/6/25; Wall Street Journal, 6/7/25) mentioned that the charges against Abrego Garcia stem from recent information supplied by jailhouse informants.  The articles failed to note that such testimony is notoriously unreliable, as documented by research, and frequently results in wrongful convictions.

Though there are six unnamed co-conspirators listed in the indictment, it appears as though the majority of the charges rely on the testimony of one or two of these individuals. Simon Sandoval-Moshenberg, one of Abrego Garcia’s attorneys, told CNN’s Erin Burnett (6/6/25), “The very first question I’m going to be asking is, what were those two people offered to make up these really fantastic, hyperbolic allegations against Mr. Abrego Garcia?”

The DoJ’s stonewalling of Abrego Garcia’s lawyers in his civil case should raise further suspicion about why these jailhouse informants decided to come forward now, despite the DoJ’s allegation that Abrego Garcia has been involved with immigrant smuggling since 2016. None of the articles mention that Abrego Garcia had been attending yearly check-ins with ICE since 2019, and that these allegations had not come up during the six years that ICE had been monitoring him, nor were they mentioned during the trial that resulted in a judge granting him withholding of removal.

In their New York Times piece (6/6/25), reporters Devlin Barrett, Alan Feuer and Glenn Thrush dedicated two paragraphs to a 2022 traffic stop involving Abrego Garcia that the indictment cites as evidence of a smuggling operation, while curiously omitting the fact that he was not charged with a crime at the time of the incident.

None of the articles mentioned that Abrego Garcia had been in ICE detention for seven months in 2019, at the same time that the DoJ alleges he was leading an immigrant smuggling operation. Also missing in the Times and Journal’s coverage was the fact that the police officer who authored the 2019 report was later terminated for sharing “sensitive and confidential information about an ongoing police investigation with a commercial sex worker” (USA Today, 4/17/25).

The Wall Street Journal (6/6/25) published several paragraphs alleging crimes by Abrego Garcia with no rebuttal.

Two articles omitted comments from Abrego Garcia’s legal team altogether (New York Times 6/6/25; Wall Street Journal, 6/7/25). While the other articles do quote Abrego Garcia’s lawyers, they cited them only about his initial deportation and his return, but not about the criminal charges. Three articles (New York Times, 6/6/25, 6/6/25; Wall Street Journal, 6/6/25) include the same sole quote from Andrew Rossman, another one of Abrego Garcia’s lawyers:

Today’s action proves what we’ve known all along—that the administration had the ability to bring him back and just refused to do so…. It’s now up to our judicial system to see that Mr. Abrego Garcia receives the due process that the Constitution guarantees to all persons.

When given the chance to comment on the criminal allegations, Abrego Garcia’s lawyers have been clear that these charges are “preposterous.” Sandoval-Moshenberg told CBS affiliate WUSA9 (6/6/25), “What happened today is the exact opposite of due process, because due process means the opportunity to defend yourself before you’re punished, not afterwards.”

Another one of his lawyers, Chris Newman, who is also the legal director of the National Day Laborer Organizing Network, told WUSA9 (6/6/25) in the same conference:

This administration has shown amazing disregard for the Constitution, for due process and for basic decency. It is engaged in an unprecedented campaign of disinformation, defamation and cruelty directed at Kilmar’s family.

Another member of Abrego Garcia’s legal team, Brian Murray, told MSNBC’s Alex Witt (6/7/25), “Anyone who’s been looking at this case and has been watching this play out would agree this is a political and vindictive prosecution.”

In the days since Abrego Garcia’s release, his legal team has frequently made themselves available to media to speak about the criminal charges and ongoing constitutional issues surrounding his case. At a time when immigrants’ rights to free speech are under attack, the New York Times and Wall Street Journal chose to sideline the voices of their advocates.

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

CEPR (3/3/25)

This week on CounterSpin: We’ve always heard that racists hate quotas, yet Stephen Miller’s “3000 a day however which way” mandate is terrorizing immigrant communities—brown immigrant communities—around the country. The response from people of conscience can look many ways: linking arms around people in danger, absolutely; vigorously disputing misinformation about immigrants, whether hateful or patronizing, also. But another piece is gaining a deeper, broader understanding of migration. News media could help answer one implied question—“Why is anyone trying to come to the US anyway?”—by grappling with the role of conditions the US has largely created in the places people are driven from. We’ll talk about that largely missing piece from elite media’s immigration coverage with Michael Galant, senior research and outreach associate at the Center for Economic and Policy Research.

Inequality.org (5/29/25)

Also on the show: Anyone who pays attention and cares can see that the Trump budget bill is a brazen transfer of resources from those that are trying to meet basic needs to those that can’t remember how many houses they own. But corporate reporting rarely breaks out economic policy in terms of how it affects different people—especially how it affects communities for whom they show no consistent concern. Economic policy is itself racialized, gendered, regionalized, targeted. Humanistic journalism would help us see that.

LaToya Parker is a senior researcher at the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, and co-author, with Joint Center president Dedrick Asante-Muhammad, of the recent piece “This Federal Budget Will Be a Disaster for Black Workers.”

New York comptroller Brad Lander being arrested by DHS secret police for asking to see their warrant (AP, 6/17/25).

US Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents detained New York City’s comptroller, Brad Lander, as he and other activists escorted immigrants in the halls of Manhattan’s federal immigration court house (AP, 6/17/25; New York Times, 6/17/25; Democracy Now!, 6/18/25).

Lander is a progressive Democrat running for mayor, although he is trailing in the polls. He is only the latest of many Democrats who have been detained by federal agents in a widespread campaign of intimidation of President Donald Trump’s critics, such as California Sen. Alex Padilla and Newark Mayor Ras Baraka. New Jersey Rep. LaMonica McIver was also indicted  on “charges alleging she assaulted and interfered with immigration officers outside a New Jersey detention center” (AP, 6/10/25), the same case Baraka was involved in.

Feds also briefly detained an aide to New York Rep. Jerrold Nadler. The arrest and hospitalization of California Service Employees International Union leader David Huerta helped kick off the uprising against ICE in Los Angeles (Guardian, 6/9/25). Two House committees are investigating Nashville Mayor Freddie O’Connell to “determine if the mayor obstructed immigration operations” (WZTV, 6/18/25).

The witch hunt has focused on judges, too. Milwaukee County Circuit Judge Hannah Dugan faces a possible prison sentence on allegations she helped an immigrant evade authorities in her courtroom. Attorney General Pam Bondi took to Fox News (4/25/25) to warn other judges who run afoul with the executive branch: “We are prosecuting you.”

During an emergency rally outside the federal building, elected officials and activists charged that Lander’s high-profile arrest was meant as the Trump administration’s warning against any citizen who advocates for immigrant families. The outrage was palpable. Said Justin Brannan, a city council member running for Lander’s job this year: “I’m from Brooklyn. You know what we call this? Complete and total bullshit.”

The New York Post (6/17/25) calls lawmakers standing up for immigrants as “pretty pathetic, and pointless,” because “even many Democrats support Trump’s deportations of criminal illegal immigrants.” (“Many” here means 9%, according to Pew—6/17/25.)

The Murdoch press, however, is celebrating the latest use weaponization of government power.

The Wall Street Journal editorial board (6/17/25):

“Do you have a judicial warrant?” Mr. Lander asks, as he’s pulled along in a scrum toward an elevator. “Do you have a judicial warrant? Can I see the judicial warrant? Can I see the warrant? I will let go when you show me the judicial warrant. Where is it? Where is the warrant?” It isn’t his job to demand a warrant or for agents to produce one to him.

First of all, Lander is the comptroller, the city’s second-highest elected officer and its chief fiduciary. Comptrollers commonly advocate for clean government, transparency and criminal justice reform. Further, he was acting mostly in his capacity as an activist doing “court watch” to protect families against deportations and family separations. Is it his job as comptroller to ensure cops aren’t abusing their power? Arguably. Is it his duty as a citizen in a democratic society? Absolutely.

The New York Post editorial board (6/17/25):

Lander repeatedly demanded to see a warrant for a guy ICE was detaining outside federal immigration court, holding his hand on the arrestee’s shoulder in an obvious bid to obstruct the agents enough to provoke an arrest.

Unsurprisingly, the charges got dropped after a few hours; Homeland Security has far more important things to do than play the heavy in Dems’ various morality plays.

Clearly, the editorial was written so hastily the writers didn’t notice a glaring contradiction: Given how many federal agents came after Lander and how long they detained him, the feds clearly did prioritize his detention. Some activists outside the courthouse even speculated that the rally calling for his release only encouraged federal agents to keep holding him.

Fox News (6/17/25) suggested that Lander’s arrest was “staged” because he was released “after being held for only a few hours.”  (The Fox video blurred out the faces of the DHS officers who weren’t masked.)

Joe Concha of the Washington Examiner told Fox & Friends First (6/18/25) Lander’s arrest was “cheesy performance art.” His paper (Washington Examiner, 6/18/25) recalled that Concha “predicted these efforts will only increase.” And Fox News (6/17/25) interviewed Joe Borelli, a Republican city council member:

“Election day is a week from today, and early voting has begun. Make no mistake, the purpose was to get the headlines that he’s getting,” said Borelli. “It’s instant name recognition and establishing even stronger liberal bona fides.”

Speaking with Fox News Digital, Borelli likened Lander’s arrest to the recent arrest of Newark Democrat Mayor Ras Baraka and the detaining of Sen. Alex Padilla, D-Calif., who were both detained for allegedly disrupting different federal events.

“This is the playbook for lefty politicians who want to make a get-a-headline. They try to get arrested, they get arrested and then fake outrage over getting arrested,” he said.

This is a common smear that right-wing media use against progressive activists: that they are engaging in publicity stunts (New York Post, 7/20/22; Jerusalem Post, 6/8/25). Put aside the fact DHS is led by Kristi Noem, famous for her cosplay photo ops: None of these people asked, or tried, to be arrested. Lander and other activists have been doing this type of work in order to publicize the injustice of these mass immigrant round-ups and the eradication of due process.

If anything, the federal agents making these arrests are the ones giving these actions more play in the news, and creating more outrage in general. In other words, right-wing media are mad that these arrests are helping to unify the outrage against mass deportations.

In fact, a headline at the right-wing Washington Times (6/17/25) warned: “Democrats’ Defiance of ICE Grows After New York Mayoral Candidate Arrested.”

It isn’t terribly unusual that these right-wing outlets are pooh-poohing Democrats and immigrants. The issue here isn’t their devotion to right-wing policies, but to a Mafia-like government that is using an unaccountable police force to arrest politicians of a rival political party. The Murdoch press isn’t just running propaganda for the White House, these outlets are fanning the flames of authoritarianism.

“Have the canines acquired strange mutations living near the power plant?” Popular Mechanics (6/8/25) asks. Spoiler alert: No.

I like to read science stories, even (maybe especially) when they’re not politically earthshaking. But sometimes what’s on the label is not what’s in the tin.

Take a Popular Mechanics story, “The Dogs of Chernobyl Are Experiencing Rapid Evolution, Study Suggests” (6/8/25). The subhead asks the question, “Have the canines acquired strange mutations living near the power plant?”

To answer that, PM reports on a paper from 2023: “The study uncovered that the feral dogs living near the Chernobyl Power Plant showed distinct genetic differences from dogs living only some 10 miles away in nearby Chernobyl City.” That is literally all we learn about the findings of the study that the headline is based on.

It does go on to say that a newer study finds that the answer to the subhead’s question is “no”:

A study published nearly two years later confidently asserts that we can cross radiation off the list of explanations for the current state of the Chernobyl canine population…. This new genetic analysis looked at the chromosomal level, the genome level and even the nucleotides of the Chernobyl dogs, and found no abnormalities indicative of radiation-induced mutation.

Oh. Never mind!

I guess an accurate headline—”Study Finds No Sign Chernobyl’s Dogs Are Radioactive Mutants”—wouldn’t have gotten as many clicks.

“Dinosaurs didn’t rule the Earth,” Big Think (6/10/26) argues, because someone found a fossil of “a badger-like mammal…biting a small horned dinosaur.”

Another piece appeared in Big Think (6/10/26) under the headline “A Mesozoic Myth: Dinosaurs Didn’t Rule the Earth Like We Think.” Intriguing! Tell us more?

It turns that the argument is basically that even though none of them were “larger than the size of a house cat,” during the age of dinosaurs “there were ancient mammal equivalents of squirrels, shrews, otters, aardvarks, flying squirrels and more.” I put it to you, though, that none of these are the kind of creatures that we think of today as “ruling the Earth.”

Imagine for a moment that Country A launched an illegal and unprovoked attack on Country B. In any sort of objective world, you might expect media coverage of the episode to go something along the lines of: “Country A Launches Illegal and Unprovoked Attack on Country B.”

Not so in the case of Israel, whose special relationship with the United States means it gets special coverage in the US corporate media. When Israel attacked Iran early last Friday, killing numerous civilians along with military officials and scientists, the press was standing by to present the assault as fundamentally justified—no surprise coming from the outlets that have for more than 20 months refused to describe Israel’s genocide of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip as genocide.

AP‘s headline (6/18/25) highlights that Israel struck “Iran’s nuclear sites and kills top generals”; the article doesn’t note that Iran says the “overwhelming majority” of the 78 people killed at that point by Israel were civilians (Times of Israel, 6/14/25).

From the get-go, the corporate media narrative was that Israel had targeted Iranian military and nuclear facilities in a “preemptive strike” (ABC, 6/13/25), with civilian casualties presented either as an afterthought or not at all (e.g., AP, 6/18/25). (As the Israeli attack on Iran has continued unabated for the past week in tandem with retaliatory Iranian strikes on Israel, the Iranian civilian death toll has become harder to ignore—as, for example, in the Washington Post’s recent profile of 23-year-old poet Parnia Abbasi, killed along with her family as they slept in their Tehran apartment building.)

On Monday, June 16, the fourth day of the assault, the Associated Press reported that Israeli strikes had “killed at least 224 people since Friday.” This figure appeared in the eighth paragraph of the 34-paragraph article; the first reference to Iranian civilians appeared in paragraph 33, which informed readers that “rights groups” had suggested that the number was a “significant undercount,” and that 197 civilians were thus far among the upwards of 400 dead.

Back in paragraph 8, meanwhile, came the typical implicit validation of Israeli actions:

Israel says its sweeping assault on Iran’s top military leaders, uranium enrichment sites and nuclear scientists, is necessary to prevent its longtime adversary from getting any closer to building an atomic weapon.

That Israel’s “preventive” efforts happened to occur smack in the middle of a US push for a diplomatic resolution to the Iranian nuclear issue has not proved to be a detail that is overly of interest to the US media; nor have corporate outlets found it necessary to dwell too deeply on the matter of the personal convenience of war on Iran for Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu—both as a distraction from the genocide in Gaza, and from his domestic embroilment in assorted corruption charges.

In its own coverage, NBC News (6/14/25) highlighted that Netanyahu had “said the operation targeted Iran’s nuclear program and ‘will continue for as many days as it takes to remove this threat.’” Somehow, it is never deemed worth mentioning in such reports that it is not in fact up to Israel—the only state in the region with an (undeclared) nuclear arsenal, and a non-signatory to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty—to be policing any perceived nuclear “threat.” Instead, Israeli officials are given ample space, time and again, to present their supposed cause as entirely legitimate, while getting away with murder—not to mention genocide.

A Washington Post article (6/16/25) manages to blame the Iranian officials for not keeping their people safe from Israeli missiles.

Its profile of the young poet Abbasi notwithstanding, the Washington Post has been particularly aggressive in toeing the Israeli line. Following Netanyahu’s English-language appeal to Iranians to “stand up” against the “common enemy: the murderous regime that both oppresses you and impoverishes you”—a pretty rich accusation, coming from the man currently presiding over mass murder and all manner of other oppression—Post reporter Yeganeh Torbati (6/14/25) undertook to detail how some Iranians “see potential salvation in Israel’s attack despite risk of a wider war.”

In her dispatch, Torbati explained that in spite of reports of civilian deaths, “ordinary Iranians” had “expressed satisfaction” at Israel’s attacks on Iran’s “oppressive government.” As usual, there was no room for any potentially relevant historical details regarding “oppressive” governance in Iran—like, say, the 1953 CIA-orchestrated coup d’état against the democratically elected Mohammad Mossadegh, which paved the way for the extended rule-by-terror of the torture-happy Iranian shah, whose oppression was aided by manic acquisition of US weaponry.

On Monday, Torbati was back with another report on how, amid Israel’s attacks on Iran, the Iranian population had “lamented the lack of adequate safety instructions and evacuation orders” from its government, “turning to social media for answers.” The article quotes a Tehran resident named Alireza as complaining that “we have nothing, not even a government that would bother giving safety suggestions to people”—although it’s anyone’s guess as to what sort of suggestions the government is supposed to offer given the circumstances. Try not to be sleeping in your apartment when Israel decides to bomb it?

We thus end up with an entire article in a top US newspaper suggesting that the issue at hand is not that Israel is conducting illegal and unprovoked attacks on Iran, but rather that the Iranian government has not publicized proper safety recommendations for dealing with said attacks. At one point, Torbati concedes that “the government did provide some broad safety instructions,” and that “a government spokeswoman, Fatemeh Mohajerani, recommended that Iranians take shelter in metros, mosques and schools.”

Refusing to leave it at that, Torbati goes on to object that “it was unclear why mosques and schools would be safer than other buildings, given that Israel had already targeted residential and other civilian structures”—which again magically transforms the issue into a critique of the Iranian government for lack of clarity, as opposed to a critique of Israel for, you know, committing war crimes.

To the New York Times (6/15/25), mass assassination of Iranian leaders is a “playbook” and “following the script.”

Which brings us to the New York Times, never one to miss a chance to cheerlead on behalf of Israeli atrocities—like that time in 2009 that the paper’s resident foreign affairs columnist literally advocated for targeting civilians in Gaza (FAIR.org, 1/30/25), invoking Israel’s targeting of civilians in Lebanon in 2006 as a positive precedent. Now, a Times article (6/15/25) headlined “Israel’s Attack in Iran Echoes Its Strategy Against Hezbollah” wonders if another Lebanese precedent might prove successful: “Israel decimated the group’s leadership last fall and degraded its military capabilities. Can the same strategy work against a far more powerful foe?”

After reminiscing about “repeated Israeli attacks on apartment buildings, bunkers and speeding vehicles” in Lebanon in 2024—which produced “more than 15 senior Hezbollah military commanders eliminated in total”—the piece speculates that Israel’s ongoing attacks on Iran and assassinations of top Iranian officers seem “to be following the script from last fall” in Lebanon. Swift confirmation comes from Randa Slim at the Middle East Institute in Washington: “It’s all targeted, the assassination of their senior officials in their homes.”

Never mind that Israel’s activity in Lebanon last fall amounted to straight-up terrorism—or that somehow these “targeted assassinations” managed to kill some 4,000 people in Lebanon between October 2023 and November 2024 alone. In unceasingly providing a platform to justify Israeli aggression and mass civilian slaughter throughout the region, the US corporate media at least appears to be following its own script to a T.

Pro-Israel zealots commonly attempt to discredit criticism of the Israeli government by equating such criticism with antisemitism, because Israel is the world’s only state with a Jewish majority.

One way of lifting up this accusation is to say that pro-Palestine leftists hold Israel to a different standard by focusing on Israel and ignoring human rights concerns in other countries. The World Jewish Congress (5/4/22) gives supposed examples of this, such as “accusing Israel of human right violations while refusing to criticize regimes with far worse human right abuses, such as Iran, North Korea, Iraq and Pakistan,” or “rebuking Israel for allegedly violating women’s rights, while ignoring significantly worse abuses carried out by governments and terrorist organizations.”

To the New York Times (6/14/25), saying that people are opposed to Israel and not to Jews is “making excuses.”

The New York Times (6/14/25) recently invoked this in an editorial headlined “Antisemitism Is an Urgent Problem. Too Many People Are Making Excuses.” To the board’s credit, the editorial talks about how antisemitism plays a big role in the Trump administration’s racist and demagogic rule—although it could have gone further into analyzing how antisemitism is at the center of fascism’s other conspiratorial bigotries: that Jewish masterminds are behind mass immigration (FAIR.org, 10/30/18) and Black Lives Matter (Fox Business, 12/15/17).

But the editorialists aim at least as much criticism at the left for its vocal opposition against the ongoing genocide and starvation in Gaza. Yes, the editors admit that “criticism of the Israeli government is not the same thing as antisemitism,” and insist that they themselves “have abhorred the mass killing of civilians and the destruction of Gaza.” They also said that pro-Israel activists “hurt their own cause when they equate all such arguments with antisemitism.”

There’s a “but” coming. “But some Americans have gone too far in the other direction,” the board said, pointing to the “3D test” of “delegitimization, demonization and double standards” that it says is a key test for determining “when criticism of Israel crosses into antisemitism.” “Progressive rhetoric has regularly failed that test in recent years,” they write:

Consider the double standard that leads to a fixation on Israel’s human rights record and little campus activism about the records of China, Russia, Sudan, Venezuela or almost any other country. Consider how often left-leaning groups suggest that the world’s one Jewish state should not exist and express admiration for Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis—Iran-backed terrorist groups that brag about murdering Jews. Consider how often people use “Zionist” as a slur—an echo of Soviet propaganda from the Cold War—and call for the exclusion of Zionists from public spaces. The definition of a Zionist is somebody who supports the existence of Israel.

Let’s take these one at a time. It is depressingly telling that the first line echoes a year-old editorial in the right-wing City Journal (4/14/24) that condemned students for not aiming their protests at Syria, Russia or China. The most obvious answer to these “gotcha” scenarios is that the US and US universities are not funding human rights violations or wars initiated by any of these countries. The protests against Israel’s actions in Gaza are growing in the US precisely because of US support for Israel. Students often want to see their universities divest from Israeli entities as a way to put pressure on Israel, the same way activists mobilized against South African apartheid.

The US and its allies have imposed sanctions on Russia (Reuters, 2/27/22; Politico, 2/28/22; Al Jazeera, 4/24/24), and the US is currently in a trade war with China (CNN, 6/11/25); the State Department has declared it will “aggressively” revoke the visas of Chinese students (Reuters, 5/29/25). The Trump administration’s new travel restrictions ban people from Sudan and highly restrict entry for Venezuelans (NPR, 6/9/25). The Council on Foreign Relations (3/11/25) estimates that the US has given Ukraine $128 billion to defend against the Russian invasion, and the House of Representatives has an entire committee devoted to investigating China’s ruling Communist Party.

The Times next asks us to “consider how often left-leaning groups suggest that the world’s one Jewish state should not exist.” Left-leaning groups generally oppose ethnostates, and tend not to make an exception for Israel, whose ethnic policies have been condemned as “apartheid” by the world’s leading human rights groups. As for expressing admiration for Hamas et al.: You’ll rarely hear US progressives praising Hamas, but you will hear them blaming Hamas’s violence on the thousands of Palestinians killed by Israel prior to October 7, 2023.

The Times goes on to complain that the word “Zionist,” which it defines as “somebody who supports the existence of Israel,” is used as a slur. But Zionism hasn’t become a thorny word because of antisemitism. Zionists are defending a political system where rights and freedom depend on one’s religion and ethnicity, a concept the small-d democrats of a liberal paper like the Times would otherwise abhor. The word “Dixiecrat” is remembered today only as a bad word, not because these people were from the American Southeast, but because they advocated for segregation.

The Times, as usual, wrongly equates Zionism with Jewishness. There are many Jewish non-Zionists and anti-Zionists, including sects that view Zionism as a sort of false messianism. There are also many Christian Zionists—who far outnumber Jewish Zionists—who see Israel as a necessary means to the biblically foretold End Times.

The editorial admits that the Trump administration “has also used [antisemitism] as a pretext for his broader campaign against the independence of higher education.” The paper notes: “The combination risks turning antisemitism into yet another partisan issue, encouraging opponents to dismiss it as one of his invented realities.”

The Times is absolutely right that the Trump administration’s vociferous attacks on antisemitism are ineffective, precisely because they are patently just a stick with which to beat his enemies in academia. But that is the exact same problem that the Times editorial has: If you use charges of antisemitism as a pretense to smear critics of a genocidal government, you are doing nothing to protect Jews.

ACTION ALERT: You can send a message to the New York Times at [email protected] or via Bluesky: @NYTimes.com. Please remember that respectful communication is the most effective. Feel free to leave a copy of your message in the comments thread here.

Trigger warning: discussion of suicide and its depictions.

The New York Times Magazine (6/1/25) ignored ethical guidelines designed to keep reporting from encouraging suicide.

The New York Times Magazine recently published a cover story (6/1/25) that gave in-depth representation to the challenges faced by a chronically sick, disabled woman named Paula Ritchie, age 52. Ritchie dealt with underdiagnosed illnesses and pain, as well as challenges in supporting herself and managing her mental health.

The Times then told the story of Ritchie ending her own life out of despair over her situation. The journalist, Katie Engelhart, observed and documented her suicide, up until the last breath left her body. “I was with Ritchie until the very end,” she posted on X (6/1/25). Engelhart gave lengthy justifications for Ritchie’s choice to end her life, and described several people who supported her in that decision.

Articles like this aren’t common in the media. Suicide prevention is typically regarded as both a social good and an ethical responsibility. In the US and Canada (where the article takes place), suicidal people are involuntarily detained to prevent their deaths. It has long been illegal in Canada (and many US states) to assist or even “counsel” a person to commit suicide.

There are also ethical standards that guide media outlets in reporting on suicide, in order to minimize the risk of glamorizing or idealizing it. These guidelines are based on research showing that the media has an outsized influence when it comes to suicide. Graphic, detailed and sensationalized coverage has been shown to increase the “risk of contagion,” according to one guide. AP News specifically tries to avoid detailing the “methods used” in stories that reference suicide, based on this research.

The Times violated almost all of the published guidelines by personalizing, detailing, dramatizing, justifying and sentimentalizing Ritchie’s suicide, as well as by making it a cover story. The story featured close-up images of the method of Ritchie’s death and what appears to be her post-mortem body.

The World Health Organization urges journalists covering suicide not to “explicitly describe the method used” or “use photographs, video footage or social media links that relate to the circumstances of the suicide,” among other guidelines.

So why wasn’t there generalized outrage or pushback from other media? The only significant outcry came from thousands of disabled people on social media.

The simplest answer is that Ritchie’s suicide was administered by a doctor, and legal in Canada. Media tend to be more accepting of the unacceptable when it is government-sanctioned. In 2021, the country expanded its Medical Assistance in Dying (MAiD) law to permit physician-assisted suicide for disabled people who aren’t suffering terminal illnesses. The law and its implementation have been extremely controversial, as the article noted. Similar laws have been passed or introduced across Europe.

The Times article reinforced a popular belief that disability is a fate worse than death. The disabled author Imani Barbarin sums it up in the title of her forthcoming book: If I Were You, I’d Kill Myself. It’s a refrain disabled people are accustomed to hearing, the frightful implication of which is that accommodations aren’t worth the bother, and death is for their own good.

The media has a tendency to reinforce this idea in stories about disability. As I previously wrote about for FAIR (1/20/21), the New York Times (4/10/20, 12/24/20) published stories early in the Covid-19 pandemic suggesting that disability should be considered in determining who had a right to Covid ventilators, based on unproven myths of “quality of life.” The articles cited literal eugenicists as experts, and didn’t invite disabled people to the conversation.

In Engelhart’s Times article, she appeared to offer a sensitive and balanced view on the debates around MAiD expansion. Yet the article was laden with ableist rhetoric, medical misinformation and subtle propaganda from the well-funded “right to die” movement. It also left out prominent critical facts about MAiD.

Engelhart omitted that the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (3/11/25) issued a report in March that condemned Canada’s MAiD, and recommended that the country “repeal” the expanded law and halt plans for future expansion. The report outlined how benefits and healthcare for disabled people are inadequate in Canada, resulting in coercion around MAiD, especially for women and marginalized groups. People have been sharing stories of coercive MAiD practices since it was expanded (e.g., Independent, 6/23/23; New York Post, 11/8/22; X, 6/4/25).

It’s significant that the most powerful international body issued such a strong condemnation of MAiD; it’s something that anyone following the issue should know about, and Engelhart has published a book on MAiD and speaks about it constantly, yet she left it out of her article.

Dying With Dignity Canada’s goals include, according to the Walrus (1/12/24) “making MAiD available to people whose sole condition is a mental disorder” and “expanding MAID to ‘mature minors’ age twelve and older.”

Engelhart did discuss some of the issues exposed by the UN, but she cited “disability rights advocates,” “critics” and “opponents,” not the UN. She also didn’t name or quote these opponents, aside from a few uneasy doctors. None of the many disability rights, human rights and religious organizations that have condemned MAiD expansion were named, and only some of their arguments were discussed. Missing, for instance, was the fact that a promised expansion of disability benefits was tabled just after MAiD expansion was approved, suggesting the government saw the suicide program as another solution, of sorts, to the disability problem.

Also missing from the article was the role of a powerful lobbying group known as Dying with Dignity Canada (DwD), which has raised millions of dollars from corporate and wealthy donors (Walrus, 1/12/24). DwD has had an enormous influence on the Canadian government and media conversations on MAiD. The organization isn’t named in the Times Magazine piece, but its propaganda is subtly woven throughout.

Engelhart has been more explicit about her pro-MAiD leanings in other writings and statements (e.g., Neiman Storyboard, 3/3/21; NPR, 3/9/21), as well as in online responses to comments on her Times Magazine piece.

As evidence of her bias, look at the way Engelhart introduced the terminology in the Times article: “Canada’s Medical Assistance in Dying (MAiD) program—what critics call physician-assisted suicide.” It’s a curious attribution. Is there a more direct, factual way to describe what happened to Ritchie than suicide? It’s a subtle nod to DwD, which seeks to remove the “suicide” from assisted suicide. From the organization’s website:

We do not use the terms assisted suicide or euthanasia because they stigmatize people who are suffering intolerably and want to access their right to a peaceful death. Suicide is a desperate act of self-harm, while medical assistance in dying is a legal, federally regulated end-of-life choice, driven by hope and autonomy.

The Merriam-Webster definition of suicide is “the act or an instance of ending one’s own life voluntarily and intentionally.” DwD seems to be attempting to redefine the word to soften what happens with MAiD.

On Twitter, Engelhart has argued that “assisted death” is a less “politically loaded” term than “assisted suicide.” She has also taken issue with the AP for referring to MAiD recipients as “killed.” It’s not propaganda to state that when someone dies, they are “killed” by the cause of death. People are killed by cancer, accidents and self-inflicted wounds as much as by murder.

Engelhart’s efforts to soften the language of assisted suicide calls to mind crime reporters using “police-involved shooting” to say that police have shot someone. The common norms for speaking about suicide and shootings can apply without harm or distortion of the facts.

The Times Magazine article reflected some of the contradictions inherent to DwD ideology that appear throughout Engelhart’s work. For instance, she often compares assisted suicide rights to abortion rights, a DwD talking point. But she also compares it to the merciful “euthanizing” of “beloved pets.” Unlike people who elect abortions, animals do not get to choose their fates, or even express their wishes. Humans project our assumptions onto pets, including that their suffering must be a fate worse than death.

Despite Engelhart’s seeming alignment with the “dying with dignity” movement, to her credit, she did expose that there wasn’t absolute “dignity” in Ritchie’s death. The article ends with a gruesome description of Ritchie’s last moments, including her expression of “horrible” discomfort.

Dr. Matt Wonnacott, the doctor who approved euthanasia for Paula Ritchie: “If you tell me that you’re suffering, who am I to question that?” he told Engelhart.

Engelhart provided a lot of detail about Ritchie’s medical conditions, but relied on outdated, vaguely sourced and ableist ways of describing chronic illness. Here and elsewhere, her work is mostly sourced to doctors, especially MAiD providers, and patients who want to die, but not the many people who live with and manage complex chronic disease.

As a disabled journalist, I see Ritchie’s story through a different lens than Engelhart. I have many of her conditions, deal with ongoing suffering, sometimes severe, and was suicidal at one point.

Engelhart described Ritchie as if she were too difficult to diagnose sufficiently beyond a collection of symptoms, including head injury, migraine, fatigue, dizziness, long-standing depression and PTSD from childhood trauma. Yet I know that it can take ten or more years for a person to get properly diagnosed with most chronic illnesses, if they are lucky. I also know that chronic illness patients deal with doctors who gaslight, misdiagnose and psychologize symptoms.

The doctor who authorized Ritchie’s suicide, Matt Wonnacott, appears to be one of those. He was a primary source in the story. Engelhart did leave it open for readers to feel uncomfortable with Wonnacott’s approach. Although he acknowledged that Ritchie still had treatment options, he admitted to making decisions to approve assisted suicide based on “gestalt” and “patient choice” more than medicine. On the other hand, Engelhart seemed to take the doctor’s medical assessments at face value, not interrogating his knowledge or biases.

At one point, Engelhart referred to a category of MAiD patients with “functional disorders…that are poorly understood within medicine, and disputed within medicine, and that some clinicians believe have a significant psychological component.” Who are these clinicians? She did not say, but then listed a series of conditions that are not considered, by official diagnostic criteria, to be psychological: “fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue, irritable-bowel syndrome, some kinds of chronic headaches.”  “Functional” has a history, like “hysteria” before it, of being used as a catch-all for misunderstood women’s illnesses.

As for “chronic fatigue,” it is more properly known as Myalgic Encephalomyelitis, or ME. There is an epidemic of it lately, as it is commonly caused by Covid-19. As such, there are countless recent studies proving its physiological causes. At one point, Engelhart discussed how Ritchie’s muscles work one minute, then “suddenly buckle” the next, writing: “This suggested that the buckling was due to psychological causes or a lack of effort.” Yet Ritchie seemed to be demonstrating a hallmark symptom of ME known as “post-exertional malaise.”

Engelhart included a lot of detail about Ritchie’s care and medications, with the effect of seeming like every option was exhausted. Yet I am surprised by what is missing. There is no mention of dysautonomia or its treatments, even though Ritchie has difficulty bathing herself and getting out of the bath, both common in that illness. There is no mention of cutting-edge treatments for ME, like antivirals for reactivated viruses, or naltrexone. And there is no mention of the new class of CGRP migraine drugs, which have rescued millions of people from horrible constant pain.

In place of medical investigation, Engelhart uses rhetoric and sentiment to portray Ritchie as a lost cause. She supports this portrait with classist and ableist imagery, like mentioning Ritchie’s “old TV and a window that looked out on a row of garbage bins,” her “stained” floors, her trouble bathing and long history of depression. She quotes people in Ritchie’s life who liked her, but also found her difficult, “vicious,” and “loud and excessive.”

I have a different perspective on Ritchie. She comes across to me as resourceful in pursuing help, a strong person who has survived tremendous suffering, and compassionate to others. She is surrounded by friends when she dies. She has common illnesses that have been under-researched due to medical misogyny. And she has been denied cutting-edge treatments due to the profound gulf between research and practice, as well as long-established bigotry in medical care. In my perception, if she had been properly diagnosed and treated, she may or may not have felt differently about ending her life.

The Economist‘s cover story (11/21/24) seemed to encourage not just legalizing suicide, but suicide itself.

Engelhart did a skillful job of portraying her own role in Ritchie’s suicide as if she were a passive observer. In a separate interview she gave with the Times about writing the piece, she said she “was trying to be as small a presence as possible in the room.” Yet she also admitted that Ritchie reached for her hand just before she died, so she couldn’t have been that small. Engelhart didn’t reflect, in the interview, on the role she may have played in Ritchie’s fate, or the ethics of her project.

The article emphasized that Ritchie knew she was being interviewed by a writer for the New York Times Magazine. She knew that her story would be amplified worldwide, but especially if she continued to end her life. Engelhart’s body of work on MAiD is mostly about people who elect and complete the act of suicide. That validation, alone, could have been a form of encouragement, especially for someone who felt isolated and unheard.

Best practices in suicide prevention are based on studies showing that suicidal people are uniquely and extremely vulnerable to suggestion, and that suicidality is usually temporary. According to a journalism guide from the Trevor Project, which aims to prevent suicide in LGBTQ youth, “More than 50 research studies worldwide have found that certain types of news coverage can increase the likelihood of suicide in vulnerable individuals.”

With the Times’ story, the worst-case scenario almost happened. One reader, a patient with Long Covid, responded on social media that the article caused him to consider that maybe assisted suicide would be a good option for him. After reading the responses of disabled people, he had more context and changed his mind. (I am protecting his identity.)

There is growing support for the expansion of assisted suicide across the world and in the media (e.g., Economist, 11/13/21, 11/21/24). The pandemic has eased people’s discomfort with preventable death, especially of elderly and disabled people. Engelhart’s book got a lot of attention around the height of Covid-19’s Omicron wave. Meanwhile, the current US administration is suggesting that worthiness for healthcare should be tied to social value.

It’s a key time for news organizations to recall their ethical obligations around reporting on suicide. At the very least, the news shouldn’t stop calling it “suicide” just because those who die have been approved for MAiD due to disability.

Stories of chronically sick people who resist MAiD and/or survive suicide attempts are rarely given as much in-depth treatment or column inches in the media. But those stories might give readers more context in considering how to feel about these policies. The New York Times even gave a flattering interview (11/16/24) to a doctor who has elsewhere been condemned for her unethical and too-eager MAiD practices and has been restricted from practicing everywhere (London Times, 7/19/24; Globe and Mail, 3/9/16).

News outlets should also consider hiring disabled journalists and editors to work on stories like this, or at least journalists who are curious enough to investigate medicine critically. Mainstream writing about health and disability has long ignored the insights of chronic illness patients, unless to use individual cases to speak over collective concerns. We need stories about disability and illness that don’t rely mostly on the medical establishment for expertise, especially given its long history of aligning with eugenics.