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Wikipedia editor Molly White told the Washington Post (4/25/25) that the Trump administration was “weaponizing laws to try to silence high-quality independent information.”

The Trump administration is very upset with Wikipedia, the collaboratively edited online encyclopedia. Ed Martin, acting US attorney for the District of Columbia, sent a letter (4/24/25) to the Wikimedia Foundation, the site’s parent nonprofit, accusing it of “allowing foreign actors to manipulate information and spread propaganda to the American public.”

The letter said:

Wikipedia is permitting information manipulation on its platform, including the rewriting of key, historical events and biographical information of current and previous American leaders, as well as other matters implicating the national security and the interests of the United States. Masking propaganda that influences public opinion under the guise of providing informational material is antithetical to Wikimedia’s “educational” mission.

The letter threatened the foundation’s tax-exempt status, demanding “detailed information about its editorial process, its trust and safety measures, and how it protects its information from foreign actors,” the Washington Post (4/25/25) reported.

Wikipedia has been attacked before by countries with censorious reputations. Russia threatened to block Wikipedia “because of its entry on the Russian invasion of Ukraine,” reported Euractiv (3/4/22), and the site has been blocked in China (BBC, 5/14/19). Turkey lifted a three-year ban on Wikipedia in 2020 (Deutsche Welle, 1/16/20).

Martin’s letter indicates that the Trump administration is inclined to join the club.

‘Notice a theme?’

Bethany Mandel wrote in the New York Post (6/25/24) that Wikipedia displayed “bias” because its article about her used to quote her tweet (6/30/14) about Hamas: “Not nuking these fucking animals is the only restraint I expect and that’s only because the cloud would hurt Israelis.”

Right-wing media in the US have been complaining about Wikipedia for a while, displaying the victim mentality that fuels the conservative drive to punish media out of favor with the MAGA movement. Here are a few headlines from Pirate Wires, a right-wing news site that covers technology and culture:

• “How Wikipedia’s Pro-Hamas Editors Hijacked the Israel/Palestine Narrative” (10/24/24)
• “How Soros-Backed Operatives Took Over Key Roles at Wikipedia” (1/6/25)
• “Wikipedia Editors Officially Deem Trump a Fascist” (10/29/24)

“More than two dozen Wikipedia editors allegedly colluded in a years-long scheme to inject anti-Israel language on topics related to the Israeli/Palestinian conflict,” reported the New York Post (3/18/25), citing the pro-Israel Anti-Defamation League. “Conservative public figures, as well as right-leaning organizations, regularly fall victim to an ideological bias that persists among Wikipedia editors,” Post writer Bethany Mandel (6/25/24) alleged, citing research by the right-wing Manhattan Institute.

Under the headline “Big Tech Must Block Wikipedia Until It Stops Censoring and Pushing Disinformation,” the Post (2/5/25) editorialized that the site “maintains a blacklist compendium of sources that page writers and editors are allowed to cite—and …which will get you in trouble.” The latter category, the Post claims, includes “Daily Caller, the Federalist, the Washington Free Beacon, Fox News and even the Post. Notice a theme?”

(Wikipedia’s list of “perennial sources,” which are color-coded by reliability, marks numerous left-wing as well as right-wing sources as “generally unreliable” or “deprecated”; the fact that the Post implies only right-wing sources are listed is an indication that its reputation as “generally unreliable for factual reporting” is well-deserved.)

‘Stop donating to Wokepedia’

Early Wikipedia staffer Larry Sanger told Fox News (3/7/25) he wants the government to investigate government influence on Wikipedia.

This hostility is amplified by one of Wikipedia’s founders, Larry Sanger, who accused the site of having a left-wing bias on Fox News (7/16/21, 7/22/21), although he has reportedly not been involved with the site since leaving in 2002 (Washington Times, 7/16/21). He even requested Elon Musk and the administration’s Department of Government Efficiency to investigate possible government influence at Wikipedia (Fox News, 3/7/25). It’s an Orwellian situation, asking the government to use its muscle against the site on the grounds that it might have previously been influenced by the government.

Musk, the mega-billionaire who bought Twitter, rebranded it as X and lurched it to the right (Guardian, 1/15/24; NBC News, 10/31/24), also has his problems with Wikipedia. Before he took on a co-presidential role in the Trump White House, Musk  (X, 12/24/24) posted, “Stop donating to Wokepedia until they restore balance to their editing authority.”

The conservative Heritage Foundation is also gunning for Wikipedia. The think tank developed Project 2025, the conservative policy document guiding the Trump administration (Atlantic, 4/24/25) that has also called for tighter government control of broadcast media. Unsurprisingly, it “plans to ‘identify and target’ volunteer editors on Wikipedia who it says are ‘abusing their position’ by publishing content the group believes to be antisemitic,” the Forward (1/7/25) reported. The paper speculated that the group was targeting “a series of changes on the website relating to Israel, the war in Gaza and its repercussions.”

For all the right-wing media agita about Wikipedia‘s alleged pro-Palestinian bias, there is of plenty evidence that Zionists have for years been trying to push the site into a more pro-Israel direction (American Prospect, 5/1/08; Guardian, 8/18/10; Bloomberg, 3/7/25).

Capturing online media

AI’s heavy reliance on Wikipedia for training data (Verge, 4/17/25) means Wikipedia‘s point of view will largely shape the answers we get from AI.

One might ask, “Who cares if Wikipedia is biased?” Lots of media are biased in one direction or another. And the notion that any nonprofit organization’s political leaning requires its status be investigated is ludicrous, considering that three of the organizations hyping Wikipedia’s alleged wrongdoing—the Heritage Foundation, the Manhattan Institute and the ADL—have the same tax-exempt status. It’s hard to imagine the New York Post accepting a Democratic administration pressuring these groups to change their right-wing positions.

Wikipedia remains popular, with some 4 billion visits a month worldwide. In addition to its lengthy entries, it’s a repository of outside citations that are important for researchers on a wide range of subjects. AI models heavily rely on Wikipedia articles for training—so much so that Wikimedia offers developers a special dataset to help keep the regular site from being overwhelmed by bots (Verge, 4/17/25).

Wikipedia is being targeted by an administration that clearly wants to bring all of Big Tech and major online media under its ideological watch. So far, the right has made progress in capturing the giants in Big Tech and social media. Musk turned the site formerly known as Twitter into a right-wing noise machine (Atlantic, 5/23/23; Rolling Stone, 1/24/24; PBS, 8/13/24; Guardian, 1/4/25).

“In recent months, CEO Mark Zuckerberg has made a series of specific moves to signal that Meta may embrace a more conservative administration,” reported NBC News (1/8/25). Google donated $1 million to this year’s inauguration fund (CNBC, 1/9/25). Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, who owns the Washington Post, has grown closer to Trump (Axios, 2/27/25; FAIR.org, 2/28/25).

At the same time, the administration is disappearing international students who voice disagreement with US policy (FAIR.org, 3/19/25, 3/28/25), seeking to defund public broadcasting (FAIR.org, 4/25/25), attacking academic freedom (Guardian, 4/27/25) and weaponizing the Federal Communications Commission (FAIR.org, 2/26/25).

So it is fitting that this administration also wants to pressure Wikipedia into moving rightward. What differentiates an authoritarian regime from other right-wing administrations is that it doesn’t just establish extreme policies, but it seeks to eradicate any space where free thought and discussion can take place. The Trump administration’s actions against media and academia show he’s not just right-wing, but an authoritarian in a classic sense.

The efficacy of Martin’s letter remains to be seen, but this is an attack on Wikipedia’s editorial independence. It will undoubtedly cause other websites and media outlets with nonprofit status to wonder if their content will be the next in the government’s crosshairs.

 

Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir tweeted that Republican officials at Mar-a-Lago “expressed support for my very clear position on how to act in Gaza and that the food and aid depots should be bombed in order to create military and political pressure to bring our hostages home safely.”

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced on March 2 that “Israel has decided to stop letting goods and supplies into Gaza,” where the ongoing Israeli genocide, with the loyal backing of the United States, has officially killed more than 51,000 Palestinians since October 2023. The announcement regarding the total halt of humanitarian aid amounted to yet another explicit declaration of the starvation policy that Israel is pursuing in the Gaza Strip, a territory that—thanks in large part to 17 consecutive years of Israeli blockade—has long been largely dependent on such aid for survival.

Of course, this was not the first time that senior Israeli officials had advertised their reliance on the war crime of forced starvation in the current genocidal assault on Gaza. On October 9, 2023, two days after the most recent launch of hostilities, then–Defense Minister Yoav Gallant ordered a “complete siege” of the Gaza Strip: “There will be no electricity, no food, no fuel, everything is closed.” Two days after that, Foreign Minister Israel Katz boasted of cutting off “water, electricity and fuel” to the territory.

And just this month, Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir proclaimed that there was “no reason for a gram of food or aid to enter Gaza.” Following an April 22 dinner held in his honor in Florida at US President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort, Ben-Gvir reported that US Republicans had

expressed support for my very clear position on how to act in Gaza and that the food and aid depots should be bombed in order to create military and political pressure to bring our hostages home safely.

Never mind that the hostages would have been brought home safely as scheduled had Israel chosen to comply with the terms of the ceasefire agreement with Hamas that was implemented in January, rather than definitively annihilating the agreement on March 18. It is no doubt illustrative of Israel’s modus operandi that the March 2 decision to block the entry of all food and other items necessary for human existence took place in the middle of an ostensible ceasefire.

‘Starved, bombed, strangled’

A year ago, USAID administrator Samantha Power (CNN, 4/11/24) said it was “likely that parts of Gaza, and particularly northern Gaza, are already experiencing famine.” 

While Ben-Gvir’s most recent comments have thus far eluded commentary in the US corporate media, the roundabout media approach to the whole starvation theme has been illuminating in its own right. It has not, obviously, been possible to avoid reporting on the subject altogether, as the United Nations and other organizations have pretty much been warning from the get-go of Israel’s actions causing widespread famine in Gaza.

In December 2023, for example, just two months after the onset of Israel’s blood-drenched campaign, the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification initiative, or IPC scale, determined that “over 90% of the population in the Gaza Strip (about 2.08 million people) was estimated to face high levels of acute food insecurity, classified in IPC Phase 3 or above (Crisis or worse).” The assessment went on: “Among these, over 40% of the population (939,000 people) were in Emergency (IPC Phase 4) and over 15% (378,000 people) were in Catastrophe (IPC Phase 5).”

A full year ago, in April 2024, even Samantha Power—then the administrator of the US Agency for International Development—conceded that it was “credible” that famine was already well underway in parts of the Gaza Strip. And the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs now warns that Gaza is “likely facing the worst humanitarian crisis in the 18 months since the escalation of hostilities in October 2023”—its population being “starved, bombed, strangled” and subjected to “deprivation by design.”

Disappearance of agency

Typically, even when outlets report sympathetically on hunger in Gaza, they fail to state clearly that it is the deliberate result of Israeli policy, as in this New York Times headline (6/25/24).

None of these details have escaped the pages and websites of corporate media outlets, although the media’s frequent reliance on ambiguous wordiness tends to distract readers from what is actually going on—and who is responsible for it. Take, for instance,  the New York Times headline “Gaza Famine Warning Spurs Calls to Remove Restrictions on Food Shipments” (6/25/24), or the CBS video “Hunger Spreads Virtually Everywhere in Gaza Amid Israel/Hamas War” (12/5/24). Even news outlets that intermittently undertake to spotlight the human plight of, inter alia, individual parents in Gaza losing their children to starvation remain susceptible to long-winded efforts to disperse blame. (As of April of last year, Save the Children confirmed that 27 children in northern Gaza had already died of starvation and disease.)

In an era in which news consumption often consists of skimming headlines, the phrasing of article titles is of utmost import. And yet many headlines manage to entirely excise the role of Israel in Gaza’s “hunger crisis”—as in CNN’s report (2/24): “‘We Are Dying Slowly:’ Palestinians Are Eating Grass and Drinking Polluted Water as Famine Looms Across Gaza.” Or take the Reuters headline (3/24/24): “Gaza’s Catastrophic Food Shortage Means Mass Death Is Imminent, Monitor Says.” Or this one from ABC News (11/15/24): “Famine ‘Occurring or Imminent’ in Parts of Northern Gaza, Experts Warn UN Security Council.”

It’s not that these headlines are devoid of sympathy for Palestinian suffering. The issue, rather, is the dilution—and even disappearance—of agency, such that the “catastrophic food shortage” is rendered as transpiring in a sort of vacuum and thereby letting the criminals perpetrating it off the hook. Imagine if a Hamas rocket from Gaza killed an infant in Israel and the media reported the event as follows: “Israeli Baby Perishes as Rocket Completes Airborne Trajectory.”

‘No shortage of aid’

NBC‘s headline (4/17/24) gives Israel’s denial of a problem equal weight with aid workers’ description of Gazans’ desperate situation.

Then there is the matter of the media’s incurable habit of ceding Israeli officials a platform to spout demonstrable lies, as in the April 17 NBC News headline “Aid Groups Describe Dire Conditions in Gaza as Israel Says There Is No Shortage of Aid.” The fact that Israel is permitted to make such claims is particularly perplexing, given Israeli officials’ own announcements that no aid whatsoever may enter the territory, while the “dire conditions” are made abundantly clear in the text of the article itself: “The Global Nutrition Cluster, a coalition of humanitarian groups, has warned that in March alone, 3,696 children were newly admitted for care for acute malnutrition” in Gaza.

Among numerous other damning statistics conveyed in the dispatch, we learn that all Gaza bakeries supported by the UN World Food Programme closed down on March 31, “after wheat flour ran out.” Meanwhile, the WFP calculated that Israel’s closure of border crossings into Gaza caused prices of basic goods “to soar between 150% and 700% compared with prewar levels, and by 29% to as much as 1,400% above prices during the ceasefire.”

Against such a backdrop, it’s fairly ludicrous to allow Israeli officials to “maintain there is ‘no shortage’ of aid in Gaza and accuse Hamas of withholding supplies.” If the press provides Israel with space to spout whatever nonsense it wants—reality be damned—where is the line ultimately drawn? If Israel decides Hamas is using wheat flour to build rockets, will that also be reported with a straight face?

Lest anyone think that thwarting the entry of food into the Gaza Strip is a new thing, recall that Israel’s blockade of Gaza long predated the present war—although the details of said blockade are generally glossed over in the media in favor of the myth that Israel unilaterally “withdrew” from the territory in 2005. In 2010, the BBC (6/21/10) listed some basic foodstuffs—pardon, potential “dual-use items”—that Israel had at different times in recent history blocked from entering Gaza, including pasta, coffee, tea, nuts and chocolate. In 2006, just a year after the so-called “withdrawal,” Israeli government adviser Dov Weissglas outlined the logic behind Israel’s restriction of food imports into Gaza: “The idea is to put the Palestinians on a diet, but not to make them die of hunger.”

Fast forward almost two decades, and it’s safe to say that the “idea” has evolved; this is a genocide, after all—even if the corporate media refuse to say the word—and starvation is part and parcel of that. But on account of Israel’s extra-special relationship with the United States, US media have institutionalized the practice of beating around the bush when it comes to documenting Israeli crimes. This is how we end up with the aforementioned long-winded headlines instead of, say, the far more straightforward “Israel is starving Gaza,” a Google search of which terms produces not a single corporate media dispatch, but does lead to a January 2024 report by that very name, courtesy of none other than the Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem.

‘Starving as negotiation tactic’

Megan Stack (New York Times, 3/13/25): “Lately it feels as if the human beings in Gaza are increasingly lost from our understanding.”

That said, there have been a few surprises. The New York Times (3/13/25), for example, took a short break from its longstanding tradition of unabashed apologetics for Israeli atrocities in allowing the following sentence to appear in a March opinion article by Megan Stack: “Israeli officials are essentially starving Gaza as a negotiation tactic.” In the very least, this was a vast improvement, in terms of syntactic clarity and assignation of blame, over previous descriptions of Israeli behavior immortalized on the pages of the US newspaper of record—like that time the Israeli military slaughtered four kids playing by the sea in Gaza, and the Times editors (7/16/14) went with the headline “Boys Drawn to Gaza Beach, and Into Center of Mideast Strife.”

In the end, Israel’s starvation of the Gaza Strip is multifaceted. It’s not just about physically blocking the entry of food into the besieged enclave. It’s also about Israel’s near-total decimation of Gaza’s healthcare system: the bombardment of hospitals, the targeting of ambulances, the massacres of medical personnel (FAIR.org, 4/11/25). It’s about Israeli military attacks on humanitarian aid convoys and workers, including the April 2024 massacre of seven international employees of the food organization World Central Kitchen.

It’s about Israel razing agricultural areas, wiping out food production, devastating the fishing industry and depleting livestock. It’s about Israel bombing water infrastructure in Gaza. And it’s about Israeli troops slaughtering at least 112 desperate Palestinians queuing for flour on February 29, 2024 (FAIR.org, 3/22/24)—which was at least a quicker way of killing starving people than waiting for them to starve.

In his 2017 London Review of Books essay (6/15/17) on the use of famine as a weapon of war, Alex de Waal referenced the “physical debilitation of groups as a technique of genocide,” noting that “forced starvation was one of the instruments of the Holocaust.” It’s worth reflecting on the essay’s opening paragraph:

In its primary use, the verb “to starve” is transitive: It’s something people do to one another, like torture or murder. Mass starvation as a consequence of the weather has very nearly disappeared: Today’s famines are all caused by political decisions, yet journalists still use the phrase “man-made famine” as if such events were unusual.

As for the current case of the Gaza Strip, US establishment journalists appear to be doing their best to avoid the transitive nature of the verb in question—or any subject-verb-object construction that might too overtly expose Israeli savagery. And by treating famine in Gaza as a subject unto itself, rather than a “technique of genocide,” to borrow de Waal’s words, the media assist in obscuring the bigger picture about this very man-made famine—which is that Israel is not just starving Gaza. Israel is exterminating Gaza.

 

Janine Jackson interviewed the Institute for Policy Studies’ Khury Petersen-Smith about Yemen distortions for the April 18, 2025, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin250418Petersen-Smith.mp3

 

PBS (3/15/25)

Janine Jackson: You could say that US news media focus on this country’s lethal military assault in Yemen was distorted by the revelation that operational planning was fecklessly shared with a journalist in a Signal group chat. Though the sadder truth might be that, without that palace intrigue, US media would’ve shown even less interest in the US visiting what Trump brags of as “overwhelming lethal force” on the poorest country in the Arab world.

Most of what we’re getting are things like the April 9 parenthetical on PBS NewsHour, that the White House has reinstated emergency food aid to some impoverished countries, but “cuts will remain for war-ravaged Afghanistan and Yemen.” Yemen is presented as almost just a chess piece, a pawn in US designs in the Middle East, rather than a real place where real women, men and children live and die.

Khury Petersen-Smith is the Michael Ratner Middle East Fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies. He joins us now by phone from Boston. Welcome back to CounterSpin, Khury Petersen-Smith.

Khury Petersen-Smith I’m so grateful to be here. Thank you.

JJ: What people may have specifically heard is Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth saying:

It’s been a devastating campaign, whether it’s underground facilities, weapons manufacturing, bunkers, troops in the open, air defense assets. We are not going to relent, and it’s only going to get more unrelenting until the Houthis declare they will stop shooting at our ships.

New York Times (3/16/25)

Or that, translated into New York Times language:

Some military analysts and former American commanders said that a more aggressive campaign against the Houthis, particularly against Houthi leadership, was necessary to degrade the group’s ability to threaten international shipping.

What context, information, history—what is missing from that snapshot that might help folks better understand what’s happening right now?

KPS: Often, I want to take a big step back and go into history, even recent history, but actually, this time, let’s start with the immediate, and that statement from Hegseth. Because Hegseth is, I think, known for brash hyperbole and these wild statements. But in that statement, he was actually speaking with some precision when he said, We’re going to do this. We’re going to maintain this lethal policy until the Houthis declare that they will stop firing at US ships.

And the reason that “declare” is an important word there is because the Houthis actually had stopped firing at US ships. When Israel entered its ceasefire agreement with Hamas, the agreement that Israel then broke, and we are now—not “we” in the US, but people in Gaza—really dealing with the reality of another broken ceasefire, as Israel really tightens its grip on the Gaza Strip, but when Israel and Hamas entered that ceasefire agreement, not only did Hamas honor it, but the Houthis actually honored it in Yemen.

Responsible Statecraft (3/21/25)

So the immediate context for this latest round of vicious US bombing is that, actually, the Houthis were not firing at US ships. The Houthis had stopped their attacks. And it was the United States, really, that started the combat again, followed then by Israel, which then violated the ceasefire. So that’s a really important context, because it’s not the case that this US bombing came in response to an attack by the Houthis on US ships. Actually, the Houthis had agreed to stop fighting, and the US refused to take yes for an answer.

JJ: Right. Maybe, for some folks, what is the nature of the Houthis embargo? What was the purpose of that? When did that start?

KPS: Sure, and we can get into where the Houthis as a political force came from, but if we just go to the more recent history, in October 2023, the Houthis, which are effectively running much of Yemen, they framed their attacks on Israeli forces, on Israel and on global shipping through the Red Sea, in the context of solidarity with Palestinians, and as a response to the Israeli assault on Gaza.

Yemen is on the Arabian Peninsula. It is adjacent to the Red Sea, and that maritime corridor is extremely important for global trade.

Al Jazeera (12/4/23)

And so the Houthis were basically taking advantage of that position, of that location, and saying, Until Israel stops its bombardment of Gaza, global shipping will be affected by our armed attacks—and Israel can also expect military intervention on behalf of the Houthis. So that’s really some other context for where this has come from. And it should be noted that, in the same way that the Houthis honored the latest ceasefire, the previous ceasefire that Israel and Hamas entered in the fall of 2023, November 2023, was also honored by the Houthis—and by Hezbollah, by the way. So these forces, these regional forces outside of Palestine that have framed their armed actions as a response to the Israeli attack, they have honored the agreements that Israel has entered with the Palestinians when that has happened.

JJ: That’s important to keep in mind, because Houthis and Hezbollah, and Hamas, are kind of tossed off in media as basically being a synonym for “terrorist.” You’re never offered any explanation, really, or rarely, of their role—with Houthis, in particular, their role within Yemen. It’s just as though these are kind of ragtag violent men.

KPS: In many ways, that kind of description or that characterization of these different forces throughout the Middle East is an extension of the way that Israel and the United States portray Palestinians–that any Palestinian actions against Israel or against Israeli forces are devoid of context of the Israeli occupation, and that it’s driven by some kind of irrational hatred of Israel.

FAIR.org (10/25/24)

The other thing, in tandem with this notion of an ahistorical, decontextualized anti-Israel violence, is the notion that these are all proxies of Iran, that Iran is the puppet master in the shadows that’s pulling the strings of Palestinian forces like Hamas, as well as Hezbollah and the Houthis. And not only is that part of a campaign to demonize and really legitimize violence against Iran and throughout the region, but it also ignores the fact that these countries, of course, have their own national dynamics, and these forces have their own interests. Even if they have some alignment with Iran, they have their own interests.

And so it’s worth noting that the cause of the Palestinian freedom struggle is very popular in Yemen. This is a country that has been divided by civil war. There’s divisions in Yemen, but one of the things that really unites the Yemeni population is the support for Palestinians. And so that’s another important piece of context when we think about why the Houthis have acted the way they have, and have framed their actions in terms of the Palestinian struggle.

Middle East Eye (3/27/25)

JJ: I think I’m going to bring us back to Iran in a second, but I just wanted to say, a number of groups recently have stated the reality that US airstrikes across Yemen since mid-March are unconstitutional acts of war that lack congressional authorization. Hegseth is out there saying, We tracked this guy and he went into his girlfriend’s building and then we collapsed it. Well, as Paul Hedreen wrote for FAIR.org, that’s a war crime. Why does it seem quaint, or beside the point, to note that the US is not officially at war with Yemen, that killing civilians, as the US has done and is doing, these are crimes, yes?

KPS: Yes. There’s so many violations that are happening, but let’s start with the first one. It’s not only violations of international law that the US is committing by targeting civilian infrastructure, which it is doing in Yemen, it’s a violation of US law for the US to be effectively waging war against a country that it has not declared war against.

And to answer your question about, there’s something that’s maybe strange about just pointing that out, I think that we have to look at at least the past 25 or so years, the so-called “War on Terror.”

FAIR.org (8/31/17)

From the start, US forces have been operating in Yemen. The US special forces have been operating there. The US has carried out cruise missile strikes in the early days of the “War on Terror.” And that has continued during the Yemeni civil war, which really involved a massive intervention, and, frankly, its own kind of war, led by Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, their bombardment of Yemen, which began in 2015.

This was devastating. And the United States played such an essential role in supplying the airplanes, the bombs that those planes are dropping, but also intelligence. They did everything except drop the bomb themselves when Saudi Arabia was doing it. They supplied the targets, they supplied the planes, they supplied the bombs, to the extent that at that time in Congress, there was finally a real debate, where people like Ro Khanna and others said, Wait a minute. The US is effectively waging war here. Congress has not actually made a declaration of war. This is a violation of US law that President Trump, the first time, was carrying out.

And so I think that all that context is really important, including, by the way, the bombing that President Biden did last year of Yemen. For many years, Yemen has been a place that the US has seen fit to bomb and otherwise do violence against, with very little public discussion in this country.

FAIR.org (4/21/21)

JJ: As your colleague Phyllis Bennis wrote, the US bombing of Yemen is always referred to in the media as bombing the “Iran-backed Houthi rebels” to avoid acknowledging that, like in Gaza, the bombs are dropping on civilian infrastructure and civilians already facing devastating hunger.

I also think that carefully chosen phrasing, “Iran-backed Houthi rebels,” it sounds like it’s greasing the gears for a wider war.

KPS: I think that’s absolutely right. The first thing to say, of course, is that these bombs have a devastating impact on civilian life, on the people of Yemen. There’s this US and Israeli notion that through so-called “targeted strikes,” and what they call “precision munitions” or whatever, that they’re just targeting who they call the “bad guys.” And again, still illegal even if you’re….

JJ: Yeah. And then anyone else is a human shield.

KPS: Right? Exactly. Even if the US was only targeting and hurting and killing combatants, it would still be illegal, according to US law.

But for what it’s worth, that’s simply not the case. Civilians have suffered tremendously over these, again, more than two decades of various operations that the United States has supported. It’s been catastrophic.

Khury Petersen-Smith: “There’s suffering on a mass scale in Yemen, and the United States bears tremendous responsibility for that.”

And it’s just worth repeating that the humanitarian situation in Yemen, the destruction of Yemen’s infrastructure, the destruction of their sanitation facilities, the massive food insecurity that was caused, in particular, by the Saudi campaign of bombing—this was declared by the United Nations to be the world’s largest humanitarian crisis. Subsequently, unfortunately—devastatingly—that crisis has been, on the global stage, eclipsed by the catastrophe in Gaza. But there’s suffering on a mass scale in Yemen, and the United States bears tremendous responsibility for that. So that’s the first thing that it’s important to say.

But, again, the notion that there’s some evil Iranian puppet master pulling the strings ignores Yemen’s own history and politics. And I think that you’re absolutely right: it’s about setting up an escalation of US and Israeli violence that is targeting Iran, which, essentially, the US is preparing for. They’ve moved more ships and more personnel into the Middle East. They’re very open about threatening Iran. When they started this latest round of bombing of Yemen, the Defense spokesperson said that “we are putting Iran on notice.” So it’s a pretty thinly veiled threat toward Iran, and I think that we should take it very seriously. I think that for many  in the United States, it might be unimaginable for the US to have an open war with Iran, but I think that we are going to have to take these threats very seriously, and work to prevent it.

CNN (2/2/17)

JJ: Let me just end on that note: What are the places for intervention? I am always sorry to sort of end with “call your congressperson,” but what are the levers that we have to work with, to prevent this slow-motion nightmare that we’re looking at? And then, also, what would you like to see journalists do?

KPS: I think that it is important for people to put pressure on US officials. And of course that includes members of Congress, where, unfortunately, there’s quite a large degree of unity in Congress about attacking Iran. And that’s been true for a long time.

In fact, the last time Trump was in office, there were members of Congress who were saying that Trump wasn’t going hard enough on Iran. This was during the era of so-called “maximum pressure.”

So just challenging that consensus is extremely important. We should keep in mind that, in the early days of the Israeli bombardment of Gaza, members of Congress could say what they have always said, which is: You may not like this Israeli operation, but A) Israel has this so-called “right to defend itself,” and B) this is what the American people want. And then they no longer were able to say that, because they were flooded with calls and demonstrations and so many messages saying that the majority of Americans actually opposed this. And that only grew as the situation went on.

Voice of America (1/27/17)

And that kind of cleavage between US elected officials and the US population is important. It lays the basis for actually changing that policy. So getting that ball rolling around Iran, before things escalate, is extremely important.

JJ: I appreciate that.

What I have seen that is critical and probing on this has been independent reporting. And I guess that might be the place, obviously, to continue to look. But what would you like journalists to be especially looking out for, or especially trying to avoid?

KPS: If I could say one thing to journalists who are doing their work right now, I would encourage them to please consider Iran and Yemen countries just like any other country. And countries that, when the people of these countries speak, know that there’s a diversity of opinions, as exists in every single society. And when the government speaks, they should take it seriously enough to evaluate it critically. And that’s true of any government.

And, frankly, one of the things that I’m struck by, this persistent reality in US journalism, is that countries like Israel and United States, particularly when they speak on international questions, and particularly when we talk about Iran or Palestine or Yemen, US journalists afford this credibility to the US and Israel that they deny to Palestinians and Yemenis and Iran.

When Israel bombs Gaza, and we hear the reports of how many people were killed, it’s still the case that American journalists use the Israeli language of saying “according to Gaza’s Hamas-run health ministry,” as though US government agencies are identified with whatever political party happens to be in power at the moment. That’s simply not true.

Associated Press (3/25/25)

The question is, why is there this kind of skepticism or cynicism, this notion that, well, this might not be a credible source, the government in Palestine, but the notion that the Israeli government or the US government, which have been shown to lie so many times—I mean, Pete Hegseth about this very episode, that our conversation is about, this scandal about sharing these plans on Signal, he lied directly to reporters.

And so I really hope that instead of affording him whatever credibility US journalists have afforded government officials, which I have thoughts about that as well, certainly now, when one has lied directly to you, the media, I hope that you treat his statements with the appropriate amount of interrogation. And then take seriously the perspectives that are coming out of Yemen and Iran, which are interesting and should be evaluated with the same tools of journalism that you extend elsewhere.

JJ: All right, then. We’ve been speaking with Khury Petersen-Smith of the Institute for Policy Studies. You can find their work online at IPS-DC.org. Thank you so much, Khury Petersen-Smith, for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

KPS: I’m so grateful too. Thank you, Janine.

 

NPR CEO Katherine Maher (center) testifies in Congress against cuts to public broadcasting (NPR, 4/15/25).

NPR (4/15/25) found itself having to write its own obituary recently when it reported that the “Trump administration has drafted a memo to Congress outlining its intent to end nearly all federal funding for public media, which includes NPR and PBS.”

The White House declared in a statement (4/14/25) that

American taxpayers have been on the hook for subsidizing National Public Radio (NPR) and the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS), which spread radical, woke propaganda disguised as “news.”

It said the administration would ask Congress to rescind $1.1 billion, or two years’ worth of approved funding, from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the federally created and funded organization that channels money to both national and local public broadcasters.

‘Finally get this done’

Fred Rogers defends the Corporation for Public Broadcasting before Congress (5/1/69).

Republicans have been threatening to defund public broadcasting since its inception. Fred Rogers, known for his children’s program Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, testified in support of PBS before Congress in 1969 in the face of attempted cuts to the fledgling CPB during the Nixon administration (PBS, 11/22/19).

After the 2010 Republican congressional takeover, the House of Representatives under then–President Barack Obama voted to defund NPR and prohibit “public radio stations from using federal grant money to pay dues to NPR,” according to PBS (3/17/11). This came “a week after conservative activists secretly recorded an NPR executive making derogatory comments about Tea Party supporters,” leading to the “resignation of NPR CEO Vivian Schiller.”

But even when Republicans have had full control of Washington, the GOP has backed down from destroying public broadcasting generally, recognizing the popularity of shows like Sesame Street with constituents—and the ease with which they have wrung content concessions from the networks.

Indeed, while some right-wing critics seem truly opposed to public broadcasting, the repeated retreats from following through suggest that more of those critics preferred to simply use their leverage over CPB funding to push NPR and PBS political programming to the right. (See FAIR.org’s critical coverage of NPR here and PBS here.)

Times may be different now, though. Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation policy book that guides much of this administration’s actions, says forcefully:

All Republican presidents have recognized that public funding of domestic broadcasts is a mistake…. The next conservative president must finally get this done and do it despite opposition from congressional members of his own party if necessary.

With Voice of America journalists fighting in court against the broadcaster’s closure (LA Times, 3/19/25; AP, 3/28/25), and the administration’s weaponization of the Federal Communications Commission to chill speech of private and public broadcasters (FAIR.org, 2/26/25), the threat against PBS and NPR is very real.

Unpopular cuts

The right is loving the news. The New York Post (4/14/25) reported:

The White House memo notes that NPR CEO Katherine Maher once called Trump a “fascist” and a “deranged racist”—statements that Maher told Congress last month she now regrets making—and cites two recent PBS programs featuring transgender characters.

Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.) applauded the plan Monday, tweeting: “NPR and PBS have a right to publish their biased coverage—but they don’t have a right to spend taxpayer money on it. It’s time to defund the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.”

More broadly, however, the proposed cuts aren’t popular, as only “about a quarter of US adults (24%) say Congress should remove federal funding from NPR and PBS,” according to Pew Research (3/26/25), while a “larger share (43%) say NPR and PBS should continue to receive funding from the federal government.”

Where CPB’s money goes (from its financial report).

While the cut wouldn’t decimate NPR, which only gets 1% of its funding directly from the CPB, the impact on its member stations could be significant, especially in minor media markets. (And NPR also gets 30% of its funding from those member stations’ programming and service fees.) Seventy percent of CPB funding goes directly to local public radio and public television stations. As Maher explained on NPR’s All Things Considered (4/16/25):

So the big impact would be on rural stations, stations in geographies that are quite large or complex in order to be able to receive broadcasts, where infrastructure costs are very high.

This could result in “those stations really having to cut back services or potentially going away altogether.”

The blow to public television, which faces higher costs and gets a much bigger chunk of its funding from the CPB, would be more dire—again, especially in smaller media markets. Both PBS NewsHour (4/16/25) and the New York Times (4/1/25) noted that Alaska Public Media, an NPR and PBS affiliate, could shutter entire stations in what is already a news desert.

Even if Congress manages to muster the votes to block the rescission of funds for now, Trump’s knives are clearly out for public broadcasting. Earlier this year, Inside Radio (1/31/25) reported, FCC chair Brendan Carr launched an investigation into

whether NPR and PBS stations are violating the terms of their authorizations to operate as noncommercial educational stations by running underwriting announcements on behalf of for-profit entities.

As FAIR (Extra!, 9–10/93) has long pointed out, the “underwriting announcements” on public broadcasting are commercials under a different name, and they violate the noncommercial promise of both PBS and NPR. But the Trump administration is not offering to increase public funding so these outlets can be less dependent on corporate sponsorship; to the contrary, it’s trying to take both federal and corporate money away in hopes of destroying public media altogether.

Clamping down on dissent

Victor Pickard (Annenberg, 3/16/22): “A robust public media system is beneficial—perhaps even essential—for maintaining a healthy democratic society.”

One could look at this threat as part of Trump’s general distrust of major media and desire to seek revenge against outlets he believes have been unfair to him (AP, 12/14/24; Fox News, 4/14/25). Another way to look at the situation is that cuts to public broadcasting send a message to the Republican base that the administration is serious about reducing federal spending generally—a purely symbolic message, of course, since CPB funding amounts to 0.008% of the federal budget.

But going after public broadcasters is also a part of the neo-fascist playbook authoritarian leaders around the world are using to clamp down on dissent and keep the public in the dark, all in the name of protecting the people from partisan reporting  (Political Quarterly, 3/28/24). That’s largely because strong public media systems and open democracy go hand in hand (Annenberg School, 3/16/22).

In Argentina, President Javier Milei has moved to shut down media seen as too left-wing, including the national news agency Télam. The move was blasted by press advocates and trade unionists (Página 12, 3/1/24; Reason, 3/4/24). “Télam as we knew it has ceased to exist. The end,” a presidential spokesperson reportedly said last year (Clarín, 7/1/24).

The Guardian (5/6/24) reported that journalists at the Italian state broadcaster RAI have struck “against the ‘suffocating control’ allegedly being wielded by Giorgia Meloni’s right-wing government over their work,” which included allegations that the network censored “an antifascism monologue that was due to be read on one of its TV talkshows by the high-profile author Antonio Scurati.”

After Meloni took power in 2022, according to Le Monde (7/23/24), RAI,

considered a bastion of the left, faced show cancellations, strategic personnel changes and program restructuring, all seen as part of a far-right cultural conflict under the pretext of promoting diversity.

The union representing RAI journalists warned (La Stampa, 1/26/25) that the broadcaster’s editorial control has shifted from hosts to a shadowy new management, which “risk[s] wiping out the work that over 150 journalists have been doing for years in network programs.”

The far-right Israeli government is pushing a bill to privatize the Israeli Public Broadcasting Corporation (IPBC), which the nation’s attorney general warned threatened to silence criticism of the government and create a “chilling effect” on other media outlets (Jerusalem Post, 11/24/24). The attack on Israeli public media comes as Netanyahu’s government has sought to curtail press freedom generally in Israel since the nation invaded Gaza in 2023 (Deutsche Welle, 11/28/24), including a government boycott of the left-leaning newspaper Haaretz (Guardian, 11/24/24), and intensified military censorship of the press (+972, 5/20/24). The death toll among Palestinian journalists in the Israeli invasions of Gaza and Lebanon has been catastrophic (FAIR.org, 10/19/23, 5/1/24, 3/26/25).

What these figures have in common with Trump is that they aren’t just extreme in their conservatism, they are actively opposed to democracy (New Yorker, 3/7/23; Foreign Policy, 12/9/23; Jacobin, 6/14/24).

While the US right has no shortage of TV networks, radio shows, websites and podcasts, the attack on public broadcasters, widely regarded as Blue State media, tells the MAGA movement that the government is working to cleanse society of any remaining opposition to its illiberal takeover (CNN, 3/26/25). Trump’s move against PBS and NPR is in line with these other anti-democratic regimes, attempting the same kind of transition to autocracy. His administration is a part of a global authoritarian movement that wants less media, academia and other democratic institutions, because these can be incubators of critical dissent against the government and corporate elite.

NPR and PBS don’t always live up to that mission. But cutting their ability to operate makes politics more opaque by limiting news consumers’ options beyond privately owned right-wing broadcasters. And that appears to be the point.

 

https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin250425.mp3

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

 

Revolving Door Project

This week on CounterSpin: Elon Musk reportedly told Tesla investors that he’ll be amping down his role with the Department of Government Efficiency to, one guesses, bring his big brain back into their service. Like the “War on Terror,” “DOGE” is a thing that was in part spoken into normalcy by the corporate press. Media seem ready to, if not embrace, to make respectful space for whatever hot nonsense is proffered—if it fits within their political template. In this case, it’s a thing—not officially a new Cabinet-level department, but acting like one—wildly powerful, yet utterly opaque and run by an unelected billionaire. DOGE sparked lawsuits about its legality from day one, but today’s news is about, legal or not, what it’s doing and how we can respond. The Revolving Door Project is tracking all of that; we hear from executive director Jeff Hauser.

https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin250425Hauser.mp3

 

Pregnancy Justice

Also on the show: There’s no reason you need to know that Selena Chandler-Scott is a 24-year-old woman from Georgia who had a miscarriage last month; pregnant people lose those pregnancies routinely. You should know that Chandler-Scott was sent to jail for her miscarriage, and though later released, she won’t be the last. “Fetal personhood” may sound abstract or legalistic; but this case brings home vividly how granting legal rights to embryos and fetuses doesn’t “potentially” “open the door to,” but concretely, today, means undermining the rights of people who carry pregnancies, leaving them open to surveillance, suspicion and prosecution.

US media seem uninterested in Chandler-Scott’s story and its implications, but we hear from Karen Thompson, legal director at Pregnancy Justice.

https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin250425Thompson.mp3

 

Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at press coverage of Pope Francis.

https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin250425Banter.mp3

 

 

Politico (4/16/25) finds “a disconnect between political elites”—i.e., its own subscribers—”and the electorate.”

A recent Politico article (4/16/25) gave readers an excellent lesson in how not to report on a poll—unless the goal is to push politicians to the right, rather than reflect how voters are truly feeling.

“California Voters Have Trump-Resistance Fatigue, Poll Finds,” declared the headline. The subhead continued: “From taking on Trump to hot-button issues, voters writ large embraced a different approach—although Democrats are more ready to fight.”

From the start, the piece framed its polling results as showing the California “political elite” are out of step with voters, who are apparently tired of all this “Trump resistance” being foisted upon them. Reporter Jeremy White explained that “the electorate is strikingly more likely to want a detente with the White House,” and that “voters are also more divided on issues like immigration and climate change.”

But problems with this framing abound, from its wrong-headed comparison to its skewing of the results, revealing more about Politico‘s agenda than California voters’ preferences.

‘Driving the state’s agenda’

First of all, the poll in question—which the article never links to—surveyed two samples of people: registered California voters and “political professionals who are driving the state’s agenda.” Those “influencers” are a sample taken from subscribers to three of Politico‘s California-focused newsletters, which, the article explained, “included lawmakers and staffers in the state legislature and the federal government.” Presumably that sample also included many journalists, lobbyists, advocates and others who closely follow state politics.

But in a country where the political right has overwhelmingly rejected reality- and fact-based news in favor of a propaganda echo chamber, one can safely assume that subscribers to Politico, a centrist but generally reality-based media outlet, will include vanishingly few right-wingers. In contrast, in a state where 38% of voters cast a ballot for Trump in 2024, a representative sample of voters will necessarily include a significant number of Trump supporters. In other words, by sampling their own subscribers, Politico has selected out most right-wing respondents and created a group that is by definition going to poll farther to the left than the general voting public of California.

On top of that, people subscribed to Politico‘s state-focused newsletters are highly informed about the policies being polled on. One of Politico‘s sources points this out, explaining that “they’re more aware of the factual landscape.”

As polling expert David Moore (FAIR.org, 9/26/24) has explained, large segments of the voting public are disengaged and uninformed on most policy issues, so their opinions on survey questions that don’t provide a great deal of context are not terribly firm or meaningful. There’s very little reason, then, to compare policy opinions of California political professionals from Politico‘s subscription list with a cross-section of California voters, unless your purpose is to push lawmakers to the right.

‘Lower the temperature’

And based on how they skew the polling numbers, that’s exactly what Politico appears to be trying to do here. Regarding the “Trump-resistance fatigue,” White wrote:

The poll shows that while Democratic voters favor taking on Trump, the electorate broadly wants their representatives to lower the temperature. Forty-three percent of registered voters said leaders were “too confrontational”—a sentiment largely driven by Republicans and independents—compared to a third who found them “too passive.” A plurality of Democrats surveyed, 47%, wanted a more aggressive approach.

This is what gives the piece its headline. But it conveniently leaves out all the voters who said state leaders’ level of confrontation was “about right”—a sizable 24%. In other words, 57%—a 14-point majority—either approve of their state leaders’ resistance to Trump, or want more of it, yet Politico manages to spin that into a headline about Trump-resistance fatigue.

The poll Politico didn’t link to.

Turning to one of the “hot-button issues” the poll asked about, Politico told readers that “a plurality of voters is skeptical of legal immigration.”

What the hell does that mean, you ask? White doesn’t say, except to note several paragraphs later that voters are “more likely to support reducing legal immigration” than the political elite are. Looking at the poll, it would appear to come from the question: “The US admits over a million legal immigrants a year. Do you think the number should be [increased, decreased, stay about the same]?”

Forty-three percent of respondents said “decreased,” either “a lot” or “a little,” while 21% said “increased” and 36% said “stay about the same.” Technically, sure, a “plurality” want fewer legal immigrants (which isn’t exactly the same thing as being “skeptical” of legal immigration). But, just as with the “Trump-resistance fatigue” spin, this buries the majority opinion, which is not “skeptical,” being either fine with current levels of immigration or wanting to see more.

On immigration, the article also reports:

While a clear 60% of voters support the state’s “sanctuary” laws, which partition local law enforcement from federal immigration authorities, policy influencers were 20 points more likely to support that policy.

Again, that Politico subscribers in California poll to the left of voters is to be expected. That voters still support sanctuary laws by 20 percentage points despite the relentless onslaught of fearmongering from the Trump administration, as well as both right-wing and centrist media, about immigrants? That seems like important news—that Politico would apparently prefer to bury.

ACTION ALERT: Messages to Politico can be sent here (or via Bluesky @Politico.com). Remember that respectful communication is the most effective.

Featured Image: Protesters gathered at San Francisco’s Civic Center Plaza to protest the Trump administration on April 5, one of 137 “Hands Off!” demonstrations across California that day (Creative Commons photo: Lynn Friedman).

 

Reuters not only had a stand-alone story (4/22/25) about Palestinians’ response to Francis’ death, but included his advocacy for Gaza in its main obituary (4/21/25).

The obituaries for Pope Francis in the leading US newspapers ignored the late pontiff’s commitment to the Palestinian people and the acute suffering in Gaza in the last years of his life. Many of them ran separate pieces that highlighted Francis’ concern for Gaza and the response of Palestinians to his death, but they failed to mention these aspects of his papacy in the lengthy obituaries that summed up his life.

Born Jorge Mario Bergoglio in Argentina in 1936, Francis was the first Jesuit and the first Latin American to be pope. When he died at the age of 88, his leadership as a social justice pontiff was heralded widely.

“For Francis, the poor are ‘at the heart of the Gospel,’ and throughout his pontificate, he affirmed this by deed and word,” said the Catholic magazine America (4/21/25). His liberal philosophy addressed many pressing issues, “from climate change to global poverty, war and violence, LGBTQ+ people and women’s roles in the church,” said Sojourners (4/21/25).

Toward the end of Francis’ life, the head of the Catholic Church focused his attention on ongoing genocide in Gaza. “He used to call us at 7 p.m. every night. No matter how busy he was, no matter where he was, he always called,” George Anton, spokesperson for the Church of the Holy Family in Gaza, told NPR (4/22/25). Reuters (4/22/25) ran the headline, “Gaza’s Christians ‘Heartbroken’ for Pope Who Phoned Them Nightly.” AP (4/21/25) called these communications his “frequent evening ritual,” noting that this “small act of compassion made a big impression on Gaza’s tiny Christian community.”

Francis was generally sympathetic to addressing political and human rights for Palestinians, and under his watch the Vatican recognized the state of Palestine (BBC, 5/13/15). He “suggested the global community should study whether Israel’s military campaign in Gaza constitutes a genocide of the Palestinian people” (Reuters, 11/17/24). In his final Easter message, issued the day before his death, he called for a ceasefire in Gaza to end a conflict that “continues to cause death and destruction, and to create a dramatic and deplorable humanitarian situation” (Truthout, 4/21/25).

‘Privileged a politicized version’

As well as his call for an inquiry into charges of genocide in Gaza, the New York Post (4/21/25) didn’t like that Francis “took a very standard leftist line on President Trump, decrying his plans for mass deportation of illegal immigrants.”

Not everyone in the press approved of this act of compassion when recalling his life and church leadership. In an editorial, the New York Post (4/21/25) criticized the “leftist” positions of the “deservedly beloved figure,” complaining that Francis “even went so far as to call for an investigation of Israel over its nonexistent genocide in Gaza.”

When it came to Francis’ support for Middle East peace generally, the Jerusalem Post (4/22/25) said in an editorial, “Time and again, Israel expressed dismay at the Vatican’s tendency to elevate Palestinian narratives while brushing aside Israeli concerns.” It complained that “the Vatican’s posture under Francis consistently privileged a politicized version of the Palestinian story over the complex reality on the ground.”

But rather than criticizing Francis’ attention to Gaza, the lengthy obituaries in the most prominent US newspapers ignored his advocacy for Palestinian rights entirely.

‘Excoriated modern-day colonizers’

The New York Times‘ obituary (4/21/25) for Francis was almost 7,500 words long—but none of them were “Gaza.”

The New York Times’ obituary (4/21/25), by Jason Horowitz and Jim Yardley, did note that “he repeatedly denounced violence and, after an initial reluctance to take sides in the war in Ukraine, spoke out in support of Ukraine.”

It also reported that Francis’ travels included “focusing on exploited and war-torn parts of Africa, where he excoriated modern-day colonizers and sought peace in South Sudan.” It continued:

In 2019, Francis got on his hands and knees before the warring leaders of South Sudan’s government and its opposition, kissing their shoes and imploring them to make peace. In 2023, in declining health, he traveled to the capital city, Juba, to upbraid them on their lack of progress.

“No more bloodshed, no more conflicts, no more violence and mutual recriminations about who is responsible for it,” Francis said in the gardens of South Sudan’s presidential palace. “Leave the time of war behind and let a time of peace dawn!”

Yet regarding his outspoken concern for Gaza, the Times found room for not a word.

‘Sometimes took controversial stances’

The Wall Street Journal (4/21/25) said Francis “sought to refocus the Catholic Church on promoting social and economic justice”—but his focus on Gaza could not be acknowledged.

Obituaries at other major US newspapers also failed to include Francis’ Palestine focus. A lengthy obituary in the Washington Post (4/21/25), for example, noted that the pope’s first official trip was to the “Italian island of Lampedusa, a burdened way station for refugees seeking sanctuary in Europe from conflicts in North Africa and the Middle East,” a nod to the fact that he offered a home to migrants in need. But it didn’t mention Gaza.

The Wall Street Journal’s obituary (4/21/25) didn’t say anything about the topic either, though it said that Francis

made a priority of improving ties with the Islamic world, washing the feet of Muslims on Holy Thursday, visiting nine Muslim-majority countries and insisting that Islam was, like Christianity, a religion of peace.

The same is true with AP‘s obituary (4/21/25), which likewise commented instead that he “charted new relations with the Muslim world by visiting the Arabian Peninsula and Iraq.” USA Today’s obituary (4/21/25) said Francis “sometimes took progressive or controversial stances on pressing issues, such as same-sex couples and climate change,” but it didn’t bring up Gaza.

By contrast, it was not hard to find references to Gaza in Francis’ obituaries in major non-US English-language outlets. The British Guardian (4/21/25) noted, “During his recent period in hospital, he kept up his telephone calls to the Holy Family church in Gaza, a nightly routine since 9 October 2023.” The Toronto-based Globe and Mail (4/21/25) included Palestine in a list of war-ravaged places Francis prayed for, and devoted most of a paragraph to his nightly Gaza calls.  Reuters (4/21/25), headquartered in London and owned by Canada’s Thomson family, noted that Francis’ last Easter Sunday message “reiterated his call for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza—a conflict he had long railed against.”

Though the major US obituaries all ignored Gaza, the same outlets published separate articles on Francis and Gaza. USA Today (4/21/25) ran “Pope Francis Used Final Easter Address to Call for Gaza Ceasefire.” The Wall Street Journal (4/23/25) had “Pope Francis Kept Up Routine of Calling Gaza Until the End.” For the New York Times (4/22/25), it was “Even in Sickness, Pope Francis Reached Out to Gaza’s Christians.” AP (4/21/25) offered “Pope’s Frequent Calls to a Catholic Church Made Him a Revered Figure in War-Battered Gaza,” an article that appeared on the Washington Post‘s website (4/21/25).

These stand-alone pieces are welcome, and spotlight the importance of the Gaza crisis to Francis. But the official obituaries in these major outlets are meant to stand as a permanent record of Francis’ life and career. By relegating Francis’ compassion for Palestine to sidebars, as though it were only of transient interest, US outlets eliminated a central aspect of his papacy from that record.

Mike Gallagher (Wall Street Journal, 4/15/25) insists the “scientific elite…should have come clean about the pandemic’s laboratory origin.” His evidence for such an origin? “Western intelligence agencies…favor that view, and most Americans agree.”

For a while it seemed like the dubious hypothesis that the virus that causes Covid did not jump from animals to humans, but was released from a Chinese lab, might be fading away. But the US government and the media are breathing new life into this zombie idea, contributing to the vilification of China and undermining actual scientific research.

In a Wall Street Journal op-ed (4/15/25), former Republican Rep. Mike Gallagher, who previously headed the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party, asserted that “Wuhan lab’s risky gain-of-function research was a giant mistake that cost millions of lives.” He offered as evidence that “Western intelligence agencies” who “initially bowed to political pressure and rejected the theory that Covid emerged from the Wuhan lab…now favor that view, and most Americans agree.”

The op-ed called not for a massive overhaul of scientific research into stopping the next pandemic, but for a domestic and international hunt for those responsible for such treachery, because the “Chinese Communist Party was permitted to bleach the crime scene.” Gallagher said:

Mr. Trump should establish a multination tribunal, akin to the International Criminal Court but with actual teeth, to investigate the origins of the virus, examining evidence of negligence or intentional misconduct, and determining the culpability of key people and institutions.

‘Finally comes clean’

“In 2020, when people started speculating that a laboratory accident might have been the spark that started the Covid-19 pandemic,” writes Zeynep Tufekci (New York Times, 3/16/25) they were treated like kooks and cranks.” In fact, the theory got a respectful hearing from outlets like the Washington Post (4/2/20,  4/14/20), ABC (5/3/20) and CNN (5/3/20); see FAIR.org (10/6/20). 

Gallagher isn’t alone when it comes to media outlets reheating the lab leak furor. New York Times contributing writer Zeynep Tufekci (3/16/25) stressed that “there is no strong scientific evidence ruling out a lab leak or proving that the virus arose from human-animal contact in that seafood market.” Her main evidence that the virus might have originated in a lab leak was the assessment of various intelligence agencies (mostly US, one German).

Tufekci (New York Times, 11/27/24) had previously praised President Donald Trump’s appointment of Stanford health economist Jay Bhattacharya to lead the National Institutes of Health, despite “making catastrophically wrong predictions” about the deadliness of Covid, because he “has criticized those who would silence critics of the public health establishment on a variety of topics, like the plausibility of a coronavirus lab leak.”

Tufekci’s recent column was gleefully received by right-wing media. The New York Post (3/17/25) ​​said the Times “finally ran a column by a scientist who said the public was ‘badly misled’ about the origins of Covid-19—triggering backlash from readers who say the admission comes five years too late.” It said that Tufekci—who is a sociology professor at Princeton University, and not a medical researcher, as the Post implies—“argued that officials and scientists hid facts, misled a Times journalist and colluded on campaigns to bury the possibility of a research lab leak in Wuhan, China.”

The British conservative magazine Spectator (3/18/25) reported on Tufekci’s piece with the headline “The New York Times Finally Comes Clean About Covid.” The subhead: “It only took the newspaper five years to acknowledge what people had said since the beginning.” Another right-wing British outlet, UnHerd (3/17/25), also used Tufekci’s column as fodder for a “we told you so” piece.

It’s not true that Tufekci is the first at the Times to advance the lab leak hypothesis. The Times‘ David Leonhardt promoted the concept in his widely read Morning Newsletter (5/27/21) only about a year after the US went into shutdown mode. “Both animal-to-human transmission and the lab leak appear plausible,” Leonhardt wrote. “And the obfuscation by Chinese officials means we may never know the truth.”

Molecular biologist Alina Chan was more definitive in a New York Times op-ed (6/3/24) published last year, headlined “Why the Pandemic Probably Started in a Lab, in Five Key Points.” Chan wrote that “a growing volume of evidence…suggests that the pandemic most likely occurred because a virus escaped from a research lab in Wuhan, China.” The essay “recapitulates the misrepresentation, selective quotation and faulty logic that has characterized so much of the pro—lab leak side of the Covid origin discourse,” FAIR’s Phillip Hosang (7/3/24) wrote in response.

Government talking points

Science (12/3/24): “The committee’s 520-page report…offers no new direct evidence of a lab leak, but summarizes a circumstantial case.”

In another FAIR piece (4/7/23) about corporate media pushing lab leak speculation, Joshua Cho and I noted that news and opinion pieces often cited intelligence agencies to bolster the credibility of their lab leak claims. “Readers should be asking why so many in media find government talking points on a scientific question so newsworthy,” we wrote, noting that “there is a vast amount of scientific research that points to Covid spreading to humans from other animal hosts.”

Less than two years later, as Trump prepared for his second inauguration, the federal government reintroduced the specter of “lab leak” when the Republican-led House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic released a report that offered “no new direct evidence of a lab leak,” but instead, according to Science (12/3/24), offered

a circumstantial case, including that the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) used NIAID money to conduct “gain-of-function” studies that modified distantly related coronaviruses.

The magazine also reported that “Democrats on the panel released their own report challenging many of their colleagues’ conclusions about Covid-19 origins.” The minority report noted “that the viruses studied at WIV with EcoHealth funding were too distantly related to SARS-CoV-2 to cause the pandemic.”

The following month, the CIA “offered a new assessment on the origin of the Covid outbreak, saying the coronavirus is ‘more likely’ to have leaked from a Chinese lab than to have come from animals” (BBC, 1/25/25). As AP (1/26/25) noted, however, the “spy agency has ‘low confidence’ in its own conclusion.” Reuters (3/12/25) subsequently  reported, citing “a joint report” by two German outlets, Die Zeit and Sueddeutscher Zeitung, that

Germany’s foreign intelligence service in 2020 put at 80%–90% the likelihood that the coronavirus behind the Covid-19 pandemic was accidentally released from China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology.

‘Unfounded assertions are dangerous’

According to a survey by the Global Catastrophic Risk Institute (2/24), epidemiologists and virologists believe a natural zoonotic origin for Covid is far more likely than a lab leak.

Once again, the claims about the pandemics origin being a Chinese lab leak seem to come from Western spooks and anti-Communist zealots, not actual scientists. Yet Gallagher and Tufekci present these governmental declarations, sometimes from the same agencies that brought us the Iraqi WMD hoax, as compelling evidence, seemingly more authoritative than the researchers in relevant fields who point to a zoonotic jump as Covid’s most likely source.

The Journal of Virology (8/1/24) noted that the “preponderance of scientific evidence indicates a natural origin for SARS-CoV-2.” Nevertheless, the journal reported, “the theory that SARS-CoV-2 was engineered in and escaped from a lab dominates media attention, even in the absence of strong evidence.” The immunobiologists and other scientists who wrote the essay spelled out the danger of “lab leak” myth:

Despite the absence of evidence for the escape of the virus from a lab, the lab leak hypothesis receives persistent attention in the media, often without acknowledgment of the more solid evidence supporting zoonotic emergence. This discourse has inappropriately led a large portion of the general public to believe that a pandemic virus arose from a Chinese lab. These unfounded assertions are dangerous…[as] they place unfounded blame and responsibility on individual scientists, which drives threats and attacks on virologists. It also stokes the flames of an anti-science, conspiracy-driven agenda, which targets science and scientists even beyond those investigating the origins of SARS-CoV-2. The inevitable outcome is an undermining of the broader missions of science and public health and the misdirecting of resources and effort. The consequence is to leave the world more vulnerable to future pandemics, as well as current infectious disease threats.

It is hard to believe that the world’s scientists have conspired to create research suggesting zoonotic jump (Globe and Mail, 7/28/22; Science, 10/10/22; PNAS, 11/10/22; Scientific American, 3/17/23; Nature, 12/6/24) for the sole purpose of covering up a lab leak. The Times and Journal’s unquestioning acceptance of the lab leak hypothesis endorses it as the expense of scientific research that says otherwise, and assumes that China’s government is guilty until proven innocent.

More importantly, the goal of reviving the lab leak idea seems completely divorced from preparing for the next pandemic or protecting public health. If anything, the Trump administration is making it more difficult for scientists to guard against future viral dangers, given its many cuts to scientific and medical research (All Things Considered, 2/10/25; STAT, 4/1/25; Scientific American, 4/11/25).

Recent articles giving credence to the lab leak hypothesis serve the Trump administration’s mission of reducing medical research and protections for public health, and have the side benefit for MAGA of stirring up nationalist rage against China. It’s harder to understand what people genuinely interested in protecting humanity from the next pandemic get from listening to intelligence agencies rather than scientists.

 

https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin250418.mp3

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

 

The Nation (3/27/25)

This week on CounterSpin: CBS News on April 14 said:

We’re following new violence in the Middle East. Israeli strikes hit a major hospital in northern Gaza. At least 21 people were reportedly killed. The emergency room is badly damaged. Israel accused Hamas of using the hospital to hide its fighters.

Meanwhile, Houthi militants in Yemen said they fired two ballistic missiles at Israel. The Israeli military initially said two missiles were launched and one was intercepted, but later said only one missile had been fired.

There’s information in there, if you can parse it; but the takeaway for most will be that framing: “violence in the Middle East,” which suggests that whatever happened today is just the latest round in a perennial battle between warring parties, where you and I have no role except that of sad bystander.

When it comes to Yemen, elite media’s repeated reference to “Iran-backed Houthi rebels” not only obscures the current fighting’s political origins and recent timeline, it erases the Yemeni people, who are paying the price both for the fighting and for the distortions around it, from political elites and their media amplifiers.

We get some grounding from Khury Petersen-Smith; he’s the Michael Ratner Middle East fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies.

https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin250418Petersen-Smith.mp3

 

Plus Janine Jackson takes a look back at some recent press coverage of fossil fuel companies and climate change.

https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin250418Banter.mp3

 

AP (3/13/25): “Demonstrators from [Jewish Voice for Peace] filled the lobby of Trump Tower…to denounce the immigration arrest of Mahmoud Khalil, a pro-Palestinian activist who helped lead protests against Israel at Columbia University.”

In its coverage of Jewish Voice for Peace’s Trump Tower protest, Fox News obscured the Jewish identity of protesters—while echoing antisemitic conspiracy theories and racist tropes.

JVP, an organization of Jewish Americans in solidarity with Palestinians, organized the March 13 sit-in of Trump’s Manhattan property in protest against ICE’s detention of Columbia University graduate and pro-Palestine protester Mahmoud Khalil.

As Jewish solidarity with Palestinians facing genocide does not fit neatly into the channel’s narrative that pro-Palestine protests are inherently antisemitic, Fox’s all-day coverage of the protest either cast doubt upon the organization’s Jewish identity or minimized mentioning JVP by name altogether—all while painting demonstrators as antisemites.

What’s more, discussion of the protest veered into unabashedly antisemitic conspiracy theories about how George Soros and his supposedly paid anti-American protesters seek to overthrow the West.

The coverage comes as an absurd reminder that while right-wing fearmongers cynically paint opposition to genocide or violation of due-process as antisemitic, the most-watched US cable news network has no problem echoing Goebbelsian talking points.

‘Don’t give them any advertisement’

“Look at some of the signage in here…. They hate Jewish Americans,” says Outnumbered host Harris Faulkner (3/13/25), while playing footage of protesters holding up signs proudly proclaiming their Jewish heritage.

The argument made on other programs that the protesters were antisemitic, anti-American and aligned with Nazis, requires a specific hesitance towards profiling JVP probably best captured in an interview on the Story (3/13/25) with NYPD Chief John Chell. Asked who the group was that organized the protest, he responded, “We’re well-versed in this group, I don’t wanna give them any advertisement.”

He only neglected to say the quiet part out loud—that a shout-out for JVP might advertise a reality in which protesters in solidarity with Palestine and campus demonstrators weren’t motivated by antisemitism.

On Fox‘s Outnumbered (3/13/25), host Harris Faulkner and other panelists spent ample time portraying the protesters as antisemites—while intentionally obfuscating the overtly Jewish messaging of the demonstration.

It’s not as though the panelists or reporter Eric Shawn were somehow unaware of who was protesting: About seven minutes into the coverage, panelist Emily Compagno read the back of one of the T-shirts, printed “Jews Say Stop Arming Israel.” Without missing a beat, she pivoted into an incoherent rant about how the Democratic Party and Ivy League universities venerate Hamas. A few minutes later, Eric Shawn stammered the group’s name once in passing, then never again.

Unsurprisingly, these two incidental mentions were drowned out by relentless accusations that the protesters voiced overt hatred for Jews.

Faulkner set the tone of the conversation with some of her leading remarks: “Look at some of the signage here…. They hate Israel, they hate Jewish Americans, they are Anti-American.” (Such virulently antisemitic signage included “Fight Nazis, Not Students,” “Opposing Fascism Is a Jewish Tradition” and “Never Again for Anyone.”) She then asked her audience, “If you are Jewish in that building, do you feel safe?”

Guest panelist Lisa Boothe added that protesters “hate the West,” arguing that they “are supporting the Nazis.”

‘Some said they were Jews’

“Some said that they…were Jews,” the Five panelist Greg Gutfeld (3/13/25) stuttered, “but will the media check that? I doubt it! And they will not check…who paid for those signs, who paid for those T-shirts, and…who paid for the protesters.”

When the Five (3/13/25) first mentioned the Jewish identities of the protesters about eight minutes into the broadcast, they did so to cast doubt upon the premise that Jews would engage in such an act: “Some said that they…were Jews,” Greg Gutfeld stuttered, “but will the media check that? I doubt it!”

(It’s unclear who Gutfeld considers to be “the media,” given that he’s a panelist on the top-rated show at the most-watched cable news network.)

Like on Outnumbered, the Five panelists accused protesters of supporting antisemitism while only mentioning the demonstrators’ Jewish identity in passing. Jesse Watters summarized the panel’s position best, stating that protesters were “supporting an antisemite” who “hates Jews” and “[blew] up Columbia.”

The commentary hinges on the assumption that an Islamophobic audience will hear that an antisemitic crowd rallied at Trump Tower in support of Mahmoud Khalil “blow[ing] up Columbia”—and not follow up on who organized the rally, or why.

Such buzzword-laden obfuscation reveals a paranoia in such coverage: If viewers do choose to follow up and learn more about the protesters, it might give the game away. The hoards of supposed antisemites might be raising perfectly reasonable questions about erosion of due-process and US bankrolling of genocide. Some such protests, like the one at Trump Tower, might even be Jewish-led.

‘Hands in many protest pots’

Fox News discussed George Soros as though he’s the Palestine movement’s top financier—though according to its own graphic (Will Cain Show, 3/13/25), Soros is only JVP’s fifth-biggest funder, donating a third as much as its largest donor, and accounting for less than 2% of the group’s total financing.

Curiously, for all of their concern for antisemitism, Outnumbered, the Story, the Five, the Will Cain Show (3/13/25) and Ingraham Angle (3/13/25) all had one thing in common: a conspiratorial fascination with allegedly astroturfed leftist financing. Laura Ingraham was particularly explicit:

The group Jewish Voice for Peace…bills itself as a home for left-leaning Jews…and it gets its biggest funding from groups associated with George Soros…. Soros himself has his hands in many protest pots, stirring up a toxic brew of antisemitism and anti-Americanism.

She cited a graphic displayed on the Will Cain Show, which was also referenced on the Five. It depicted Soros’ Open Society fund as the fifth-biggest funder of JVP for 2019–21, contributing $150,000. Given that JVP has an annual budget of more than $3 million, this suggests that Soros is responsible for less than 2% of the group’s financing.

Ingraham nonetheless felt the need to rail against Soros and the broader Jewish left. She also went on to characterize the pro-Palestine movement as “the overthrow-of-the-West cause.”

So the “antisemitic” pro-Palestine protests are bankrolled by an anti-American Jewish billionaire seeking to overthrow the West? Like her peers on Outnumbered and the Five, Ingraham is empowered to advance such harmful tropes, so long as she also tacks on a spurious charge of “antisemitism.”

Anti-Arab, anti-immigrant tropes

Five panelist and former Westchester County District Attorney Jeanine Pirro (3/13/25) condemned protesters “want[ing] Mahmoud [Khalil] to have all of his constitutional rights,” implying that violation of Khalil’s due process is legal because he “hates all of our Western values.”

Fox’s obfuscation of the protest’s overtly Jewish messaging is underpinned by another assumption—that Palestinian-led or immigrant-led protest against the genocide is somehow less legitimate than Jewish American–led protest. Coverage not only obscured JVP’s role in organizing the protest, but used anti-Arab tropes and calls for deportation to smear the legitimacy of protesters’ demands.

When Jesse Watters evoked fantasies of student protesters blowing up universities, or Outnumbered guest panelist (and former Bush White House press secretary) Ari Fleischer accused protesters of being illegal residents that “should all be deported from this country,” they played to the racist impulses of their audiences.

Mahmoud Khalil is a Palestinian-Syrian immigrant—thus, his opposition to a genocide in which Israel has killed at least 51,000 Palestinians in Gaza, with another 10,000 presumed dead under the rubble, is illegitimate. And if JVP protesters are Arab immigrants too, then their opposition to repression and genocide is meritless and antisemitic.

It’s another reason why it’s in Fox’s best interest not to identify the Trump Tower protesters—to allow for the assumption that they’re Arabs, or immigrants, which somehow discredits them.

Enemies with no name

As a Jewish-led organization in solidarity with Palestinians, JVP stresses the importance of challenging false antisemitism smears against their Palestinian partners and in creating a Jewish future divested from Zionism.

Fox News’s hesitancy to identify JVP is a striking contrast to Fox’s general proclivity for naming enemies. A search on FoxNews.com for the “New Black Panther Party,” a fringe Black nationalist group, yields more than 100 results; compare that to less than 30 hits on AP‘s website. A Search for “Dylan Mulvaney,” a trans influencer who was targeted in a mass-hate campaign in 2023, yields more than 5,000 results on Fox, compared to AP’s 50.

Fox News thrives upon enemies—but Jewish Voice for Peace is different. As an openly Jewish-American group, JVP challenges Fox News’ narrative that protests against genocide in Gaza are rooted in antisemitism.

“We organize our people and we resist Zionism because we love Jews, Jewishness and Judaism,” JVP’s website says. “Our struggle against Zionism is not only an act of solidarity with Palestinians, but also a concrete commitment to creating the Jewish futures we all deserve.”

To be clear, conservative and centrist outlets’ continued preoccupation with the supposed antisemitism of opponents of Israel’s genocide is never in good faith—as when the New York Times (4/14/25), reporting on “Trump’s Pressure Campaign Against Universities,” blithely claimed that “pro-Palestinian students on college campuses…harassed Jewish students,” without noting that many of the pro-Palestinian students were themselves Jewish. But the charge of antisemitism is even more ludicrous coming from an outlet that uses antisemitic tropes to make its own attacks on the pro-Palestine movement.

And the charge is most ridiculous coming from a network that is too afraid to name its enemy, as if the mere acknowledgement that some Jews oppose US support for Israel’s genocide might shake the foundations of its whole narrative.

 

The Trump administration maintains that it can send people to overseas concentration camps with impunity  because “activist judges do not have the jurisdiction to seize control of the president’s authority to conduct foreign policy” (BBC, 4/11/25).

As the Trump administration openly defies court orders to return a man wrongfully deported to a notorious mega-prison in El Salvador, some American outlets are underplaying the significance of this constitutional crisis.

In a unanimous decision the Supreme Court “declined to block a lower court’s order to ‘facilitate’ bringing back Kilmar Ábrego García,” a Salvadoran who had legal protections in the United States and was wrongfully sent to El Salvador’s Terrorism Confinement Center, or CECOT (BBC, 4/11/25).

The White House is not complying (Democracy Docket, 4/14/25). “The federal courts have no authority to direct the executive branch to conduct foreign relations in a particular way, or engage with a foreign sovereign in a given manner,” Trump’s Justice Department insists (CNN, 4/15/25). Fox News (4/16/25) said of Attorney General Pam Bondi: “Bondi Defiant, Says Ábrego García Will Stay in El Salvador ‘End of the Story.’”

In an X post (4/15/25) filled with unproven assertions that skirt the question of due process and extraordinary rendition, Vice President J.D. Vance said, “The entire American media and left-wing industrial complex has decided the most important issue today is that the Trump admin deported an MS-13 gang member (and illegal alien).” (Are we supposed to believe that the six conservatives on the Supreme Court, three of whom were appointed by Trump, are a part of the “left-wing industrial complex?”)

The complete disregard to constitutional protections of due process and to court orders should send alarm bells throughout American society. The MAGA movement condones sending unconvicted migrants to a foreign hellhole largely on grounds that they are not US citizens, and thus don’t have a right to constitutional due process. But the administration has floated the idea of doing the same thing to “homegrown” undesirables as well (Al Jazeera, 4/15/25).

‘An uncertain end’

The New York Times (4/15/25) goes out on a limb and declares that the president defying the Supreme Court is “a path with an uncertain end.”

The case is quite obviously not about the extremity or unpopularity of President Donald Trump’s policies, but a breaking point at which the executive branch has left the democratic confines of the Constitution, as many journalists and scholars have warned about. But the case is not necessarily being portrayed that way in the establishment press.

In an article about the Trump administration’s record of resisting court orders, a New York Times subhead (4/15/25) read, “Scholars say that the Trump administration is now flirting with lawless defiance of court orders, a path with an uncertain end.” In an article about “What to Know About the Mistaken Deportation of a Maryland Man to El Salvador” (4/14/25), reporter Alan Feuer described the Supreme Court’s upholding the order to “facilitate” the return of Ábrego García as “complicated and rather ambiguous” rather than a “clear victory for the administration.”

At the Washington Post (4/14/25), law professor Stuart Banner wrote an opinion piece saying that fears of a constitutional crisis were overblown, noting that while Trump is “famous for his contemptuous remarks about judges…tension between the president and the Supreme Court is centuries old.” Thus, he said, there are incentives in both branches to “not to let conflict ripen into public defiance.”

The Wall Street Journal (4/15/25) presents the prospect of the White House defying a Supreme Court order as a “showdown” that Trump might “win.”

The Wall Street Journal editorial board (4/15/25) said:

Mr. Trump would be wise to settle all of this by quietly asking Mr. Bukele to return Mr. Ábrego García, who has a family in the US. But the president may be bloody-minded enough that he wants to show the judiciary who’s boss. If this case does become a judicial showdown, Mr. Trump may assert his Article II powers not to return Mr. Ábrego García, and the Supreme Court will be reluctant to disagree.

But Mr. Trump would be smarter to play the long game. He has many, much bigger issues than the fate of one man that will come before the Supreme Court. By taunting the judiciary in this manner, he is inviting a rebuke on cases that carry far greater stakes.

These articles display a naivete about the current moment. The Trump administration and its allies have flatly declared that they believe a judicial check on the executive authority wrongly places constitutional restraints on Trump’s desires (New York Times, 3/19/25; Guardian, 3/22/25).

House Speaker Mike Johnson, responding to court rulings that went against MAGA desires, “warned that Congress’ authority over the federal judiciary includes the power to eliminate entire district courts,” Reuters (3/25/25) reported. The House also approved legislation, along party lines, that “limits the authority of federal district judges to issue nationwide orders, as Republicans react to several court rulings against the Trump administration” (AP, 4/9/25).

In other words, Trump’s defiance of the courts is part of a broader campaign to assert that the Constitution simply should not be an impediment to his rule. That’s not a liberal versus conservative debate about national policy, but a declaration that the United States will no longer operate as a constitutional republic.

‘Constitutional crisis is here’

“Think long and hard about what it means to have a president who gleefully ignores the courts,” urges Rex Huppke (USA Today, 4/15/25). “It’s time to stand up and shout ‘Hell no!’ right freakin’ now, and not a moment later.”

Pieces like the ones at the Journal, Times and Post give readers the sense that this affair is just another quirk of the American system of checks and balances, when, in fact, history could look back and declare this the moment when the Constitution became a dead letter.

Other outlets, however, appeared to appreciate the gravity of the situation. “America Is Dangerously Close to Being Run by a King Who Answers to No One” was the headline of Rex Huppke column at USA Today (4/15/25). “The Constitutional Crisis Is Here” was the headline of a recent piece by Adam Serwer at the Atlantic (4/14/25).

This case will roil on, and both the judicial system (Reuters, 4/15/25) and congressmembers (NBC News, 4/16/25) are taking action. There’s still time for the papers to treat this case with the urgency that it deserves.