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NBC News (2/4/25) put Trump’s unconstitutional attack on USAID in a Cold War frame.

Are the corporate media outlets reporting on Donald Trump and Elon Musk’s authoritarian takeover smarter than a fifth grader? Recent coverage of the president and his henchman’s blatantly unconstitutional dismembering of the US Agency for International Development (USAID) would suggest some are not.

Reports on the agency’s shuttering (Politico, 1/31/25, 2/14/25; NBC, 2/4/25) have often failed to sufficiently sound the alarm on how Trump’s efforts are upending the most basic—and vitally important—federal checks and balances one learns about in a Schoolhouse Rock episode. Instead, these reports have framed bedrock constitutional principles as if they were up for debate, and neglected to mention that the Trump administration is purposefully attempting to shirk executive restraints.

Meanwhile, much of corporate media’s justified attention on the foreign aid agency’s demise has wasted ink on a narrower, unjustifiable reason for audiences to draw objections: the loss of the “soft power” USAID gives America in its battle over global influence with its adversaries (CNN 2/7/25; New York Times 2/11/25). This sets up the precedent that Musk’s federal bludgeoning should be assessed based on the value of his target, rather than the fact that he is subverting the Constitution.

‘The least popular thing’

Michael Waldman (Brennan Center, 2/19/25): “Trump’s power grab…is the culmination of decades of pressure from conservative organizations and lawyers who have sought a way to dismantle government and curb its power to intervene in markets.”

A lawsuit by the American Foreign Service Association and the American Federation of Government Employees against the Trump administration lays out the five-alarm constitutional fire the shuttering of USAID has set off. USAID was established as an independent agency outside the State Department’s control by an act of Congress in 1998.

Longstanding judicial precedent holds that only Congress has the ability to create and dissolve federal agencies. Last year, the legislature prohibited even a reorganization of USAID without its consultation in an appropriations law. The Trump administration’s actions—justified solely by an extreme interpretation of executive authority—violate the Constitution’s separation of powers, and are indeed designed to do so.

Together Trump and Musk share interest in reconstituting US governance. The checks and balances that help to constrain executive power, along with civil service workers, are also roadblocks to the billions in federal contracts that have underwritten Musk’s empire. USAID has become the first target in their federal bludgeoning, because its relative unpopularity among voters means they might get away with rewriting the Constitution without too much public outrage. Its “the least popular thing government spends money on,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio said to a USAID official earlier this month. (Americans tend to vastly overestimate how much the US government spends on foreign aid, and think it should be reduced to a level that is actually far more than USAID’s current budget—Program for Public Consultation, 2/8/25.)  

Trump and Musk’s withdrawal of nearly all foreign aid funded through USAID is another grave challenge to the constitutional order. Since those funds were congressionally appropriated, neither Trump nor Musk has the authority to stop them, especially not on the basis of their political preferences.

The act of a president indefinitely rejecting congressionally approved spending is known as impoundment, which has been effectively outlawed in all forms since 1974. Trump has been explicit about his intent to bring impoundment back, which threatens to render Congress—which is supposed to have the power of the purse—irrelevant.

‘Musk has been clear’

Politico (2/14/25) would have better helped readers’ understanding if it hadn’t taken “Trump’s plans to shrink the federal workforce” at face value.

Such a threat to democracy requires calling it for what it is. Simple but consequential abdications of responsibility abound, though. Politico (2/14/25), for example, saw fit to reprint at face value Trump and Musk’s claims that they just wish to drastically reduce federal spending. An explainer article on Trump and Musk’s efforts made no mention that they might have ulterior motives.

In response to the question, “What is Trump and Musk’s goal?” Politico simply answered: “With Trump’s blessing, Musk has been clear that his goal is to drastically reduce the size of the government.” That Musk, the richest person in the world, whose business empire spans the globe and dominates whole industries, has resolved to dedicate his undivided attention to the cause of reducing federal spending deserves more skepticism. The fact that Musk has prioritized going after federal agencies that have had the temerity to investigate his businesses suggests a more plausible scenario.

Though the article, which is meant to give readers a brief but comprehensive overview of Trump and Musk’s efforts, briefly mentions some of the court-ordered pauses to Trump’s orders, it doesn’t discuss the overarching implications for US democracy.

Another Politico story (1/31/25), breaking the news that Trump intended to subsume USAID into the State Department, gave the move a stamp of approval by pointing out it was the fulfillment of long-held bipartisan aspirations—corporate media’s highest praise—while ignoring the unconstitutional means that brought it about. For years, the article says, “both Democratic and Republican administrations have toyed with the idea of making USAID a part of the State Department.” That’s because, Politico claimed,

there have always been tensions between State and USAID over which agency controls what parts of the multibillion-dollar foreign aid apparatus, regardless of which party is in power.

The article qualifies that USAID “describes itself” as an independent agency, as if this were up for dispute.

‘Keep America safe’

CNN (2/3/25): “Trump’s claim that he can single-handedly shut down USAID is at odds with Congress’ distinct role in forming and closing federal agencies.”

Corporate media’s failure to foreground the authoritarian threat of Trump and Musk’s USAID takedown also includes a narrow focus on its geopolitical ramifications that smooths over the unsavory aspects of the agency’s humanitarian work.

USAID oversees billions in foreign aid that is responsible for lifesaving food, medical care, infrastructure and economic development. The massive disruption in that aid is already causing death, hunger, disease outbreak and economic hardship. But a defense of that lifesaving work, and the democratic norms threatened by its unraveling, need not require a rosy picture of its imperialist motivations.

That’s exactly what the New York Times’ Daily podcast (2/11/25) accomplished, though, in an episode titled “The Demise of USAID and American Soft Power.” As has become all too frequent, nowhere during the episode’s 35-minute run time did the host, Times reporter Michael Barbaro, or his two guests, Times journalists Michael Crowley and Stephanie Nolen, mention the constitutional principles at stake in USAID’s closure (though the following episode was dedicated to the constitutional crises Trump has provoked—Daily, 2/12/25).

Instead, the podcast focused on what Barbaro described as Trump’s overturning of a decades-long bipartisan consensus about the best way to “keep America safe.” That safety, Barbaro learned by way of his guests’ contribution, is a supposedly serendipitous return on investment America receives through its strategic generosity abroad (effective altruism, one might say?). Trump has now abandoned that generosity, leaving a more brutish impression of America’s global role, and ceding ground to geopolitical adversaries, Barbaro and company said.

What threats do they identify that Americans have needed to be kept safe from? At first, Crowley said, it was the Soviet Union’s relative popularity in the developing world. After the Cold War ended, though, USAID’s justification for existence seemed thin, he acknowledged. But that didn’t last long, because it just so happened that after 9/11, “America realized that the Soviet Communist ideology that threatened us had been replaced by a new ideology. It was a terrorist ideology,” Crowley explained.

For one, it wasn’t just USAID, but the entire military industrial complex, that was inevitably going to identify a new justification for its existence, 9/11 notwithstanding. But the podcast also completely leaves out USAID’s modern role in conditioning aid to developing countries on opening up their economies to the International Monetary Fund and multinational corporations, creating the conditions for neo-colonial dispossession and Western dependency.

Dedicating a whole episode to portraying USAID’s work as a mutually beneficial marriage between developing nations’ humanitarian needs and US national security interests, all so that audiences might selfishly conclude that preserving foreign aid is in their own interests, perpetuates imperial propaganda. Pointing out how Trump’s actions harm people, including his own supporters, is well and good. But the loss of imperial soft power is not an example of that. And pointing out the actual harms without discussing the autocratic way they were inflicted risks suggesting that unconstitutional actions are acceptable as long as their results are beneficial.

Some journalists are doing a fine job of exposing the assault on USAID (e.g., New York Times, 1/28/25, 2/5/25; CNN, 2/3/25). But amid this unprecedented blitz on democratic norms, others are showing that they might need to revisit their elementary school textbooks.

 

https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin250221.mp3

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

 

CNN (2/21/25)

This week on CounterSpin: Donald Trump has declared that the US is going to “take over” the Gaza Strip, that the Palestinians who live there will be “permanently” exiled. Asked whether Palestinians would have the right to return to Gaza under his scheme, Trump said “no.” But even those corporate media who aren’t actually endorsing this illegal, inhumane plan still can’t seem to find it in themselves to call it what it is: ethnic cleansing.

Media critic, activist and teacher Gregory Shupak has been looking into big media’s systematic refusal to use appropriate language about the human rights crimes unfolding before our eyes in Palestine. He teaches English and media studies at the University of Guelph-Humber in Toronto, and he’s author of the book The Wrong Story: Palestine, Israel and the Media, from OR Books.

https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin250221Shupak.mp3

 

Color of Change/Better IRS (3/24)

Also on the show: There is a deep, if muddled, sense that the US tax system is unfair. The little guy pays too much and rich folks and corporations find loopholes and offshore accounts. And then, on a different page, there’s a story about how “we” as a country just don’t have “enough resources” to allow school kids to eat lunch, because that would mean the dreaded higher taxes! But we will shell out another billion for a fighter plane, and shut up about that.

Media outlets that fail to make meaningful connections—between those clever offshore accounts and the supposed inability to fund school lunch; between cutting funding for the IRS and doubling down on people who use the Earned Income Tax Credit—are certainly not the ones to look to for an understanding of the racial impacts of supposedly neutral tax policy and practices, however demonstrable those impacts may be.  We’ll talk about that with Portia Allen-Kyle, interim executive director at Color of Change and author of the report Preying Preparers.

https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin250221Allen-Kyle.mp3

 

 

News outlets often preferred euphemisms like “displacing” or “resettling” to the more accurate “ethnic cleansing, as in this CBC headline (2/4/25).

Earlier this month, President Donald Trump said that the US will “take over the Gaza Strip” and “own” it for the “long-term” (AP, 2/5/25), and that its Palestinian inhabitants will be “permanently” exiled (AP, 2/4/25). Subsequently, when reporters asked Trump whether Palestinians would have the right to return to Gaza under his plan, he said “no” (BBC, 2/10/25).

After Trump’s remarks, United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres (Reuters, 2/5/25) said “it is essential to avoid any form of ethnic cleansing.”

Navi Pillay (Politico, 2/9/25), chair of the UN Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, said that

Trump is woefully ignorant of international law and the law of occupation. Forcible displacement of an occupied group is an international crime, and amounts to ethnic cleansing.

Human Rights Watch (2/5/25) said that, if Trump’s plan were implemented, it would “amount to an alarming escalation of forced displacement and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in Gaza.”

Clarity in the minority

Amnesty International (2/5/25) called Trump’s proposal to forcibly transfer the population of Gaza a flagrant violation of international law”—but the phrase “international law” was usually missing from news reports on the plan.

I used the news media aggregator Factiva to survey coverage of Trump’s remarks from the day that he first made them, February 4 through February 12. In that period, the New York Times, Wall Street Journal and Washington Post combined to run 145 pieces with the words “Gaza” and “Trump.” Of these, 19 contained the term “ethnic cleansing” or a variation on the phrase. In other words, 87% of the articles these outlets published on Trump’s plan to ethnically cleanse Gaza chose not to call it ethnic cleansing.

A handful of other pieces used language that captures the wanton criminality of Trump’s scheme reasonably well. Three articles used “forced displacement,” or slight deviations from the word, while five others used “expel” and another nine used “expulsion.” Two of the articles said “forced transfer,” or a minor variation of that. In total, therefore, 38 of the 145 articles (26 percent) employ “ethnic cleansing” or the above-mentioned terms to communicate to readers that Trump wants to make Palestinians leave their homes so that the US can take Gaza from them.

Furthermore, the term “international law” appears in only 27 of the 145 articles, which means that 81% failed to point out to readers that what Trump is proposing is a “flagrant violation of international law” (Amnesty International, 2/5/25).

A ‘plan to free Palestinians’

A Wall Street Journal op-ed (2/5/25) hailed “Trump’s Plan to Free Palestinians From Gaza”—in the same sense that the Trail of Tears “freed” the Cherokee from Georgia.

Several commentators in the corporate media endorsed Trump’s racist fever dream, in some cases through circumlocutions and others quite bluntly. Elliot Kaufman (Wall Street Journal, 2/5/25) called Trump’s imperial hallucination a “plan to free Palestinians from Gaza.”

While the Journal’s editorial board (2/5/25) called what Trump wants to do “preposterous,” the authors nonetheless put “ethnic cleansing” in scare quotes, as if that’s not an apt description. The paper asked, “Is his idea so much worse than the status quo that the rest of the world is offering?”

Sadanand Dhume (Wall Street Journal, 2/12/25) wondered why “If Indians and Pakistanis Can Relocate, Why Can’t Gazans?” To bolster his case, Dhume noted that 2 million people died as a result of the India-Pakistan partition, and cited other shining moments in 20th century history, such as Uganda’s expulsion of Indians in the 1970s. That these authors implicitly or explicitly advocate Trump’s plan for mass, racist violence demonstrates that they see Palestinians as subhuman impediments to US/Israeli designs on Palestine and the region.

Bret Stephens (New York Times, 2/11/25) wrote that

Trump also warned Jordan and Egypt that he would cut off American aid if they refused to accept Gazan refugees, adding that those refugees may not have the right to return to Gaza. The president’s threats are long overdue.

Ethnically cleansing the West Bank

Al Jazeera (2/26/24): “Settler violence is a central part of the Israeli state’s policy and plan to ethnically cleanse the occupied Palestinian territory.”

A similar pattern exists in coverage of the West Bank, where evidence of ethnic cleansing is hard to miss, but corporate media appears to be finding ways to do just that.

Legal scholars Alice Panepinto and Triestino Mariniello wrote an article for Al Jazeera (2/26/24) headlined “Settler Violence: Israel’s Ethnic Cleansing Plan for the West Bank”:

Supported by the Israeli security forces and aided and abetted by the government, settler violence is a central part of the Israeli state’s policy and plan to ethnically cleanse the occupied Palestinian territory in order to establish full sovereignty over it and enable settlement expansion.

The authors noted that, at the time they wrote their article, 16 Palestinian communities in the West Bank had been forcibly transferred since October 7, 2023.

In October 2024, UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese found that throughout the Gaza genocide, “Israeli forces and violent settlers” have “escalated patterns of ethnic cleansing and apartheid in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem.” In the first 12 months after October 7,  Albanese reported, “at least 18 communities were depopulated under the threat of lethal force, effectively enabling the colonization of large tracts” of the West Bank.

Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor (2/10/25) said that Israel’s “latest ethnic cleansing efforts” entail “forcibly uproot[ing] thousands of Palestinians in the West Bank,” accompanied by

the bombing and burning of residential buildings and infrastructure, the cutting off of water, electricity and communications supplies, and a killing policy that has resulted in the deaths of 30 Palestinians…over the course of 19 days.

According to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) (2/10/25), Israeli military operations in Jenin camp, which expanded to Tulkarm, Nur Shams and El Far’a, displaced 40,000 Palestinian refugees between January 21 and February 10.

Unnoteworthy violations

I used Factiva to search New York Times, Wall Street Journal and Washington Post coverage and found that, since Panepinto and Mariniello’s analysis was published just under a year ago, the three newspapers have combined to run 693 articles that mention the West Bank. Thirteen of these include some form of the term “ethnic cleansing,” a mere 2%. Nine more articles use “forced displacement,” or a variation on the phrase, 31 use “expel,” 11 use “expulsion” and five use some variety of “forced transfer.”

Thus, 69 of the 693 Times, Journal and Post articles that mention the West Bank use these terms to clearly describe people being violently driven from their homes—just 10%. Many of the articles that address the West Bank are also about Gaza, so the 69 articles using this language don’t necessarily apply it to the West Bank.

Of the 693 Times, Journal and Post pieces that refer to the West Bank, 106 include the term “international law.” Evidently, the authors and editors who worked on 85% of the papers’ articles that discuss the West Bank did not consider it noteworthy that Israel is engaged in egregious violations of international law in the territory.

‘Battling local militants’

The Washington Post (2/2/25) captioned this image of IDF bombing with Israel’s claim that it was “destroying buildings used by Palestinian militants.”

Rather than equip readers to understand the larger picture in which events in the West Bank unfold, much of the coverage treats incidents in the territory discretely. For instance, the Wall Street Journal (1/22/25) published a report on Israel’s late January attacks on the West Bank. In the piece’s 18th paragraph, it cited the Palestinian Authority saying the Israeli operations “displaced families and destroyed civilian properties.” In the 24th paragraph, the article also quoted UNRWA director Roland Friedrich, saying that Jenin had become “nearly uninhabitable,” and that “some 2,000 families have been displaced from the area since mid-December.” Palestinians being driven from their homes are an afterthought for the article’s authors, who do nothing to put this forced displacement in the longer-term context of Israel’s US-backed ethnic cleansing.

A Washington Post  report (2/2/25) on Jenin says in its first paragraph that the fighting is occurring “where [Israeli] troops have been battling local militants.” The article then describes Palestinian “homes turned to ash and rubble, cars destroyed and small fires still burning amid the debris.” It cited the Palestinian Health Ministry noting that “at least five people were killed in Israeli strikes in the Jenin area, including a 16-year-old.”

Establishing a “troops vs. militants” frame at the outset of the article suggested that that is the lens through which the death and destruction in Jenin should be understood, rather than one in which a racist colonial enterprise is seeking to ethnically cleanse the Indigenous population resisting the initiative.

The rights of ‘neighbors’

This New York Times piece (2/4/25) acknowledges that Israeli settlements have “steadily eroded the land accessible to Palestinians”—but doesn’t call this process ethnic cleansing.

The New York Times (2/4/25) published an article on Republican bills that would require US government documents to refer to the West Bank as “Judea and Samaria,” the name that expansionist Zionists prefer. The report discusses how Trump’s return to office “has emboldened supporters of Israeli annexation of the occupied territory.”

The piece notes that hundreds of thousands of Israelis have “settled” the West Bank since Israel occupied it in 1967, and that Palestinians living there have fewer rights than their Israeli “neighbors.” The author points out that “the growing number and size of the settlements have steadily eroded the land accessible to Palestinians.”

Yet the article somehow fails to mention a crucial part of this dynamic, namely Israel violently displacing Palestinians from their West Bank homes. Leaving out that vital information fails means that readers are not a comprehensive account of the ethnic cleansing backdrop against which the Republican bills are playing out.

Recent coverage of Gaza and the West Bank illustrates that, while corporate media occasionally outright call for expelling Palestinians from their land, more often the way these outlets support ethnic cleansing is by declining to call it ethnic cleansing.

 

 

Media outlets continue to print headlines about antisemitism based on Anti-Defamation League statistics known to be faulty and politicized. In doing so, they grant undeserved credibility to the ADL as a source.

Producing statistics helps the ADL to claim objectivity when they assert that antisemitism is increasing dramatically, prevalent in all fields of society, and emanating from the left as well as the right. Those “facts” are then used to justify policy recommendations that fail to respond to actual antisemitism, but succeed in undermining the free speech rights of Palestinians and their supporters, including those of us who are Jews.

Smearing Israel critics as antisemites

James Bamford (The Nation, 1/31/24) : “The New York Times, PBS and other mainstream outlets that reach millions are constantly and uncritically promoting the ADL and amplifying the group’s questionable charges.”

While it frames itself as a civil rights organization, the ADL has a long history of actively spying on critics of Israel and collaborating with the Israeli government (Nation, 1/31/24). (FAIR itself was targeted as a “Pinko” group in ADL’s sprawling spying operation in the ’90s.)

Though it professes to document and challenge antisemitism, it openly admits to counting pro-Palestinian activism as antisemitic: In 2023, the ADL changed its methodology for reporting antisemitic incidents to include rallies that feature “anti-Zionist chants and slogans,” even counting anti-war protests led by Jews—including Jewish organizations the ADL designated as “hate groups.”

The ADL’s political motivations are clear in its advocacy for the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition of antisemitism, which alleges that criticizing Israel based on its policies (e.g., “claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor,” or “drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis“) is antisemitic. The ADL and their allies also deem speech supporting Palestinian human rights to be coded antisemitism.

Criticism of the ADL is increasing. In 2020, activists launched #DropTheADL to raise awareness among progressives that the ADL is not a civil rights or anti-bias group, but rather an Israel advocacy organization that attacks Palestinians and supporters of Palestinian rights in order to protect Israel from criticism. Last year, a campaign to Drop the ADL From Schools launched with an exposé in Rethinking Schools magazine, and an open letter to educators, titled “Educators Beware: The Anti-Defamation League Is Not the Social Justice Partner It Claims to Be,” that garnered more than 90 organizational signatories. These efforts build off research that exposes the ADL’s work to normalize Zionism and censor inclusion of Palestinian topics in the media, policy circles, schools and in society at large.

In 2023, some of its own high-profile staff resigned, citing the group’s “dishonest” campaign against Israel’s critics. In June 2024, Wikipedia editors found the ADL regularly labels legitimate political criticism of Israel as antisemitic, leading the popular online encyclopedia to designate the group an unreliable source on Israel/Palestine.

Critiquing the ADL’s statistics does not serve to argue that antisemitism is acceptable or less deserving of attention than other forms of discrimination. Rather, it demonstrates that we can’t rely on the ADL for information about the extent or nature of antisemitism—and neither should media.

A dubious source

This New York Times report (10/6/24) obscured the fact that many of the “antisemitic incidents” counted by the ADL were chants critical of Israel.

And yet corporate media use the ADL uncritically as a source for reports on antisemitism. For instance, the New York Times (10/6/24) not only headlined the ADL’s assertion that “Antisemitic Incidents Reach New High in the US,” it chose to contextualize the ADL’s findings “in the wake of the Hamas attack,” and called the ADL a “civil rights organization.”

Important media outlets like The Hill (4/16/24), with outsized influence on national policy discussions, ran similar headlines, failing to note the ADL’s highly controversial methodology.

At least the Wall Street Journal (1/14/25) acknowledged that the ADL has been challenged for counting criticism of Israel as antisemitism. But it immediately dismissed the applicability of those challenges to the ADL’s Global 100 survey, which found that 46% of adults worldwide hold antisemitic views. (The ADL’s Global 100 survey was criticized for its flawed methodology as far back as 2014, when researchers found it “odd and potentially misleading.”)

The media’s willingness to accept ADL claims without scrutiny is evident in CNN’s choice (12/16/24) not to investigate the ADL’s accusations of antisemitism against speakers at a recent conference of the National Association of Independent Schools, but rather to simply repeat and amplify the ADL’s dishonest and slanderous narrative.

Methodological faults

A Jewish Currents report (6/17/24) concluded that “the ADL’s data is much more poised to capture random swastika graffiti and stray anti-Zionist comments than dangerous Christian nationalist movements.”

Even setting aside the ADL’s prioritization of Israel’s interests over Jewish well-being, the ADL’s statistics should be thrown out due to methodological faults and lack of transparency.

Even FBI statistics, frequently cited by the ADL, don’t tell a clear story. Their claim that 60% of religious hate crimes (not mere bias incidents) target Jews is misleading, given the systemic undercounting of bias against other religious groups. Because of the history of anti-Muslim policing, Muslims are less likely to report than people of other religions.

In fact, a national survey of Muslims found that over two-thirds of respondents had personally encountered Islamophobia, while only 12.5% had reported an incident. Almost two-thirds of respondents who encountered an Islamophobic incident did not know where or how to report it. When Muslims experience hate, it is less likely to be pursued as a hate crime.

On the other hand, the ADL has an unparalleled infrastructure for collecting incident reports. It actively solicits these reports from its own network, and through close relations with police and a growing network of partners like Hillel International and Jewish Federations.

Perpetrators’ motivations are also relevant and should not be inferred. In 2017, Jews were frightened by over 2,000 threats aimed at Jewish institutions in the United States. It turned out that nearly all came from one Jewish Israeli with mental health problems. Without this level of investigation, policymakers could enact misguided policy based on the ADL’s sensationalism, like CEO Jonathan Greenblatt’s claim that “antisemitism is nothing short of a national emergency, a five-alarm fire that is still raging across the country and in our local communities and campuses.”

Bad-faith accusations

David Klion (Zeteo, 2/4/25): “How did the ADL, which for generations has presented itself as America’s leading antisemitism watchdog, find itself prostrated before the most powerful enabler of white supremacy in recent American history?”

Although critics have long argued that the ADL’s politicized definition of antisemitism and flawed statistics cannot be the basis of effective policy, policymakers continue to rely on media’s deceptive journalism.

Massachusetts State Sen. John Velis cited ADL statistics to claim the state has “earned the ignominious reputation as a hub of antisemitic activity,” and therefore needs a special antisemitism commission. In Michigan, ADL reports of escalating antisemitism led to a resolution that will affect policy in schools across the state. In Connecticut, the ADL referenced its statistics in a government announcement about changes to the state’s hate crimes laws. The ADL’s statistics undergirded the logic of President Joe Biden’s National Strategy to Counter Antisemitism.

But how can politically distorted research be the foundation for effective policy?

Antisemitism is surely increasing. Hate crimes have increased in general—most targeting Black people—especially since the first Trump presidency, and hate incidents generally rise during violent outbreaks like the war on Gaza, and during election periods. But since most antisemitism originates in the white nationalist right wing, why focus primarily on people—including Jews—who are legitimately protesting their own government’s support for Israeli actions against Palestinians? Or on Palestinians themselves, who have every right to promote the humanity and rights of their people?

The ADL’s bad-faith accusations weaponize antisemitism to protect Israel at the expense of democratic and anti-racist principles. Anyone who doubted the ADL’s politics should be convinced by its abhorrent defense of Elon Musk’s Nazi salute (FAIR.org, 1/23/25) and its support for Donald Trump.

To pursue effective public policy, policymakers and the public should refuse to cite the ADL’s flawed statistics, and instead develop thoughtful and nuanced ways to understand and address antisemitism and other forms of bigotry and discrimination. Media can play a key role by exposing the politicization of antisemitism by the ADL, including its prioritization of protection for Israel from criticism over the free speech that is fundamental to democratic discourse.

 

 

 

The wrap WaPo rejected.

The Washington Post won’t say why it cancelled a six-figure ad buy calling for Elon Musk to be fired, but it’s likely the same reason the Post insisted Musk wasn’t Nazi-saluting on Inauguration Day, and why the paper killed its endorsement of Kamala Harris: because that’s what Jeff Bezos wants.

In addition to owning the Post, Bezos is the founder of Amazon and currently the world’s third-richest human. At best, the Post is a side-hustle for Bezos, while Amazon and his other business pursuits are what truly animate him. “With Jeff, it’s always only about business,” a former employee of Bezos’s space company, Blue Origin, told the Post (10/30/24). “That’s how he built Amazon. That’s how he runs all of his enterprises.”

To sustain his sprawling empire, Bezos relies on government contracts worth billions of dollars, even as he stiff-arms regulators and irksome antitrust enforcers. This nifty maneuver is only possible if those in power play ball, but Trump didn’t during his first term (CNN, 12/9/19).

To ensure Trump II will be more amenable, Bezos has gone to lengths to grease the wheels, lavishing praise and millions of dollars on Trump and his family. He joined Musk and other tech billionaires in flanking Trump at his inauguration. (Bezos’s presence signaled “anything but independence for the Washington Post,” said Marty Baron, the paper’s former executive editor.)

Meanwhile, with Musk’s hand now on the public money spigot—thanks to Trump ceding much of the US government to him—Bezos is also busy doing favors for Musk (FAIR.org, 2/14/25), the richest person alive.

From a business perspective—the only perspective that really matters to Bezos—pissing the temperamental Musk off at a moment when he commands unprecedented power in the public and private spheres is a bad idea. So Bezos is being careful not to—as is his paper. Which brings us back to that rejected ad.

‘You can’t do the wrap’

The flipside of the Common Cause/SPLCAF ad.

The bright red ad was to wrap around the front and back pages of some print editions of the Post, including those going to subscribers on Capitol Hill, the Pentagon and the White House, ensuring top officials would lay eyes on it. Featuring a laughing Musk hovering over the White House, the ad asks, “Who’s running this country: Donald Trump or Elon Musk?”

The civic groups Common Cause and the Southern Poverty Law Center Action Fund were behind the ad wrap, which was to be accompanied by a full-page ad inside the paper.

But even though the groups had signed a $115,000 contract with the Post, the paper canceled the wrap at the 11th hour, even as it said it could run the inside ad, which hit on the same themes.

“They said, ‘You can have something inside the paper, but you can’t do the wrap,’” Common Cause president Virginia Kase Solomón told The Hill (2/16/25). “We said ‘Thanks, no thanks,’ because we had a lot of questions.”

Among them: Was the ad killed

because we’re critical of what’s happening with Elon Musk? Is it only OK to run things in the Post now that won’t anger the president, or won’t have him calling Jeff Bezos asking why this was allowed?

Kase Solomón asked the Post to explain its willingness to run the inside ad, but not the wrap. “They said they were not at liberty to give us a reason,” she told the New York Times (2/17/25).

Tellingly, in providing guidance to Common Cause on how to comply with the Post’s ad standards, Kase Solomón said the paper sent a sample ad paid for by a Big Oil group. “It was a ‘thank you Donald Trump’ piece of art,” Kase Solomón told The Hill.

The pulled ad directed readers to FireMusk.org, which states:

Musk, an unaccountable and unelected billionaire, is pushing to control public spending, dismantle the safety net and reshape our way of life to suit his interests. It’s clear what’s happening here: Musk and Trump aim to replace qualified civil servants with political allies whose loyalty lies solely with them.

‘Unacceptable business practices’

An ad from Ekō rejected by Facebook for “unacceptable business practices.”

The Post’s ad cancellation comes on the heels of Meta pulling an ad critical of Musk earlier this month. The yanked Facebook ad was purchased by the watchdog group Ekō, which had two other anti-Musk ads taken down by Meta—at least until the outlet Musk Watch made inquiries. The two other ads “were removed in error and have now been restored,” Meta told Musk Watch (2/18/25).

Meanwhile, Musk Watch noted, “Ads that were supportive of Musk and Trump were not impacted by similar errors.”

Still, one Ekō ad remains banished, with Meta citing “unacceptable business practices” as the reason.

That explanation makes a certain kind of sense. After all, alongside Bezos and Musk at Trump’s inauguration, was the world’s second richest person, Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg. And as Bezos’s Post has made clear, pissing off your fellow billionaires is indeed an unacceptable business practice.

 

 

Selling “freedom fries” at the Nebraska state fair in 2004 (Creative Commons photo: E Egan).

If you are younger than 30, you probably don’t remember there was a time in the United States when we were practically ordered to hate France. After the country’s oldest European ally voiced its opposition to the US-led push to invade Iraq (Guardian, 1/22/03; Brookings, 2/24/03), right-wing pundits called the French “surrender monkeys,” urging Americans to boycott French products (New York Post, 3/15/03; Guardian, 3/31/03).

At the same time, pro-war media urged a purge of the word “French” from our vocabulary, starting with renaming French fries to “freedom fries” (New York Times, 8/4/06; LA Times, 2/11/19; Washington Post, 2/11/19). We even got a new breakfast: freedom toast (CNN, 3/12/03). No federal language police were deployed to local communities, although the renaming did reach the House of Representatives cafeteria menu (Daily News, 2/12/19).

Revisionist maps

Google Maps adopts the Newspeak terminology for the Gulf of Mexico.

When President Donald Trump renamed the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America via executive order (USA Today, 2/10/25), the days of “freedom fries” flashed back for many of us. Once again, the country’s woes were placed on another country; everything from drugs to economic anxiety could be blamed on our neighbor to the south, now run by a woman, left-wing, Jewish climate scientist (FAIR.org, 6/4/24). Like the neocons in the post-9/11 moment flexed their imperialist muscle against “old Europe” (RFE/RL, 1/24/03), renaming the gulf is another way for this revanchist and expansionist Republican administration to assert that the Monroe Doctrine is back in a big way, and the rest of the hemisphere had better get used to it.

Much like “freedom fries,” the whole “Gulf of America” show feels like the lunacy of a dictator who’s off his rocker, akin to the fictional Latin American president in the Woody Allen movie Bananas who declares that his country’s official language will now be Swedish. But sadly, it’s not funny.

Google Maps renamed it the “Gulf of America” for those reading from the US, and Google “appears to have deleted some negative reviews left in the wake of its name change” (BBC, 2/13/25). Apple made the same change to its maps service, although the move failed to gain trust from the White House, which still views the company with suspicion (New York Post, 2/13/25). Incidentally, oil companies like Trump’s move (Wall Street Journal, 2/15/25).

The capitulation of Apple and Google validates a widespread fear that it isn’t just Elon Musk who is doing Trump’s dirty work to undo democracy, but that the Big Tech community generally has lined up to stay in the good graces of executive power. Apple CEO Tim Cook and Google each donated $1 million to this year’s presidential inauguration (Axios, 1/3/25; CNBC, 1/9/25).

‘Smearing and penalizing’

AP (2/15/25): “The body of water in question has been called the Gulf of Mexico for hundreds of years.”

Contrast that with the AP, whose reporters have been barred from official White House briefings because the agency continues to call the body of water the Gulf of Mexico (AP, 2/15/25). In a statement (2/11/25), AP executive editor Julie Pace said:

It is alarming that the Trump administration would punish AP for its independent journalism. Limiting our access to the Oval Office based on the content of AP’s speech not only severely impedes the public’s access to independent news, it plainly violates the First Amendment.

Said Aaron Terr of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (2/14/25), “When the government shuts out journalists explicitly because it dislikes their reporting or political views, that violates the First Amendment.” Committee to Protect Journalists  CEO Jodie Ginsberg (2/14/25) agreed: “These actions follow a pattern of smearing and penalizing the press from the current administration and are unacceptable.”

That pattern includes the recent Federal Communications Commission investigations into NPR and PBS funding (All Things Considered, 1/30/25), and into San Francisco’s KCBS for having “shared the live locations and vehicle descriptions of immigration officials” (KQED, 2/6/25).

Placenames have politics

The Ukraine War highlighted the political choices involved in naming places (USA Today, 4/13/22).

The critics of AP‘s banning couldn’t be more correct. As silly as the spat sounds, this is government authority using its muscle to dictate what media can and cannot stay, something people of all political stripes in the United States would normally find contrary to our constitutional ideals. If the president can compel media outlets not to call bodies of water what everyone else in the world calls them, then forcing them to assert that Greenland or the Panama Canal belong to the US isn’t so far fetched (All Things Considered, 2/17/25). Direct government force and official censorship, or the threat of it, are filters through which consent can be manufactured.

Generally, in journalism, the names of places and institutions carry a particular political connotation, and making a style choice for a media outlet can be difficult. Is that city in Northern Ireland called Derry, according to Irish Republicans, or Londonderry, as pro-British Loyalists have it (Irish Post, 7/24/15)? The choice to spell Ukraine’s capital either Kyiv or Kiev can tell the world which side of the war you’re more sympathetic toward (USA Today, 4/13/22).

During the Indonesian occupation of East Timor, it was common for US outlets to dateline reports from East Timor’s capital as “Dili, Indonesia” (Extra!, 11–12/93). This reflected Washington’s acceptance of Indonesia’s conquest; you would not have found US reports during Saddam Hussein’s occupation of Kuwait datelined “Kuwait City, Iraq.”

For some observers (China Media Project, 3/30/23), referring to China’s ruling party as the Chinese Communist Party indicates that you don’t like it (NBC News, 10/13/23). Those who prefer to call it the Communist Party of China suggest that the CCP choice indicates that you somehow view the party as global, inorganic and not distinctively Chinese.

These can be hard choices for a media outlet that wants to be both accurate and impartial, but the choice to avoid indulging in Trump’s idiocy is simple. There has never been a “Gulf of America” movement, or a general belief in the US that the Gulf of Mexico was somehow misnamed, until this order came out of the blue. What the Trump administration has done has created a fake controversy in order to bully the media, and the public, to go along with what it says, no matter how strange, giving the executive branch the opportunity to censor those who do not comply.

Sympathy for the White House

The New York Post (2/12/25) declares AP a “left-wing organization, staffed by left-wing employees, and intent on pushing left-wing narratives.”

The only way a democratic society can keep from falling into authoritarianism is if people refuse to comply, even with the little things. Google and Apple have already failed that test. Others in the corporate media are also failing, by not standing up for AP. David Brooks, a conservative columnist at the New York Times, appeared on Fox News (2/16/25) to sympathize with the White House, dismissing the affair as the usual antagonistic attitude the White House has with the press.

Isaac Schorr of the New York Post (2/12/25) called the AP’s response “snooty,” saying the wire service has its own language problem, citing its choice to abandon the phrase “late-term abortion.” Schorr is free to take issue with that, but there’s a difference: The AP made that decision on its own, not because the government specifically threatened it unless it made such a change.

The Atlantic (2/15/25), while admitting that “denying access to a media outlet because of its choice of words violates the First Amendment,” said this is a “fight that the AP probably should never have picked in the first place,” indicating that the media should simply give up when it comes to an autocrat’s insane demands. In fact, the centrist Atlantic seemed to be in tune with the tribune of American conservatism, the National Review (2/14/25), which admitted that Trump was being “silly and Big Brother-ish,” but that “AP journalists suffer from an obnoxious entitlement mentality.”

As the Washington Post’s Erik Wemple reported (2/14/25):

How outraged is the White House press corps regarding this naked violation of the First Amendment? Not sufficiently: In her press briefing Wednesday, Leavitt faced questions from only one reporter—CNN’s Kaitlan Collins—about the matter. As Leavitt recited her position, she might as well have been stomping on a copy of the Bill of Rights under the lectern: “If we feel that there are lies being pushed by outlets in this room, we are going to hold those lies accountable. And it is a fact that the body of water off the coast of Louisiana is called the ‘Gulf of America,’” Leavitt said, noting that major tech firms have acknowledged the change.

AP continues to stand firm on this issue, and that’s a positive sign, but the rest of the media class should be standing united with the wire service. It’s easy for media outlets (some, anyway) to editorialize about the horrorshow of this administration. But they need to stand up to the administration, and refuse to comply with attempts to silence outlets or dictate how they should report.

 

AP (2/4/25) concludes with Elon Musk describing his government takeover as a card game: “If we don’t take advantage of this best hand of cards, it’s never going to happen.”

Associated Press (2/4/25) evidently needed the work of ten reporters to produce “Elon Musk Tightens Grip on Federal Government as Democrats Raise Alarms.”

At first blush, the story might seem to convey concern, but look closer: We see Musk matter-of-factly described as a “special government employee, which subjects him to less stringent rules on ethics and financial disclosures than other workers.”

He’s also described as “in charge of retooling the federal government.” Is that a thing? AP suggests we believe that it is.

The debate, AP tells us, is just between Republicans who “defend Musk as simply carrying out Trump’s slash-and-burn campaign promises,” and Democrats who, “for their part, accused Musk of leading a coup from within the government by amassing unaccountable and illegal power.”  Tomato, to-mah-to, you understand.

Musk locking federal workers out of internal systems, denying them access to their own personnel files, with their pay history, length of service and qualifications: Why, that’s just “Musk’s penchant for dabbling.” He’s been “tinkering with things his entire life,” the wire service says. He learned to code as a child in South Africa, you see, and “now Musk is popping open the hood on the federal government like it’s one of his cars or rockets.”

Popping open the hood of democratic processes to tinker with them? If you rely on reporting from nominally neutral outlets like Associated Press, you might imagine that’s only a concern of partisan Democrats, not regular folks like you and me.

You can send a message to Associated Press here (or via Bluesky @APnews.com).

 

Adam Johnson (Column, 2/3/25): “The New York Times, Washington Post and CNN ran with the framing that ‘DOGE’ was some good-faith, post-ideological effort to ‘cut costs,’ ‘find savings’ and ‘increase efficiencies.’”

Having spent nearly $300 million to purchase the US presidency for Donald Trump, Elon Musk now feels entitled to do with it as he pleases. Just how radically Musk plans to remake the country was conveyed to the American people only after the election, when Musk stood behind the presidential seal on Inauguration Day and gave a Nazi salute. Then did it again. Maybe that sort of thing was OK to do in apartheid South Africa, where Musk grew up, but it’s jarring to see here in the United States.

Reporters initially struggled to meet the moment (FAIR.org, 2/4/25), downplaying Musk’s salute (the Washington Post described a “high-energy speech“), as well as his broader agenda, which Musk now openly declares a “revolution,” and consists of an unelected billionaire wresting control of nearly the entire executive branch of government. Early media reports went along with Musk’s “efficiency” mantra (Column, 2/3/25), but more recently reporters have started to find their footing, and the dangers of Musk’s project are being conveyed. Sort of.

“Reporters on the battlefield are doing what they can” to expose the radical nature of Trump’s second term, writes media columnist Oliver Darcy (Status, 2/5/25). “The news generals back in the command center, however, are largely abdicating their duties.”

‘Musk’s audacious goal’

Nowhere is this discrepancy more apparent than at the Washington Post, a newspaper famed for opposing a prior Republican president with an expansive view of executive power. These days, however, even as Post reporters like Jeff Stein are busy breaking stories (e.g., 1/28/25, 2/8/25) about the Trump power grab, the paper’s higher-ups are careful not to offend the president or Musk. The Post is even, incredibly, calling on the Constitution-defying billionaire duo to push further.

As Elon Musk seizes extraconstitutional control of the federal budget, Washington Post editors (2/7/25) urge him to use that power to go after Social Security and Medicare.

“To have any chance of achieving Musk’s audacious goal of $2 trillion in cuts,” the Post editorial board (2/7/25) wrote, “Trump will need to work with elected representatives in Congress to reform entitlement programs such as Social Security and Medicare before they become insolvent.”

While claiming it wants Trump to “erect guardrails” for Musk, the Post urges the president to abandon one of the only guardrails he established—the cutting of Social Security and Medicare, which Trump repeatedly said he wouldn’t do, but recently started waffling on.

To be clear, the Post has long called for cutting so-called entitlements (FAIR.org, 11/1/11, 6/15/23). But to do so at this moment—by encouraging a coup attempt to push further—is quite extraordinary.

The Post’s move comes as its billionaire owner, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, is lavishing praise and millions of dollars on Trump and his family, while coaching his paper to take a less critical approach in its coverage (FAIR.org, 1/22/25). Bezos’s ingratiation toward Trump started prior to the election, when Bezos personally spiked the Post’s endorsement of Kamala Harris (FAIR.org, 10/30/24).

Good news for X from Amazon

The Washington Post (2/4/25) reports on “divergent views among Jewish leaders in how to respond to Musk”: Some object to his ” Nazi-esque salute and Holocaust jokes,” others appreciate his censorship of criticism of Israel.

Bezos has also been busy making nice with Musk, his longtime rival for most powerful man on Earth and in space. On both fronts, Musk now has a decided edge, aided by his control over much of the US government, which both men’s sprawling empires rely on for billions of dollars in contracts.

With Musk’s hand on the public-money spigot, Bezos apparently did him a favor. After Musk openly heiled Hitler, Jewish leaders renewed calls to boycott Musk’s social media platform, X (Washington Post, 2/4/25). “To advertisers—including Google, Amazon and the ADL: Pull your ads now,” the Jewish leaders wrote. “The pressure is working. X’s financial difficulties prove it.”

But the boycott’s pressure was countered by Bezos’s company. “[X] got good news last week, with Amazon reportedly planning to hike its advertising on the site,” the Post (2/4/25) reported, without mentioning Bezos.

While X’s finances “were once so bad that Musk floated the idea of filing for bankruptcy,” things are suddenly looking up, the Financial Times (2/12/25) reported:

Musk famously admitted to overpaying for Twitter after he bought the social media platform known now as X for $44 billion in 2022. But the billionaire’s foray into government has coincided with a turnaround in X’s fortunes, as advertisers, including Amazon, flock back to the platform.

‘Lemmings leaping in unison’

Kathleen Parker (Washington Post, 1/24/25) likened those who condemned Musk’s Nazi gesture to “lemmings leaping in unison from a cliff”—because it’s suicidal to notice fascism in high places?

It wasn’t just Bezos’s company that threw Musk a lifeline, but also his newspaper. An initial Post headline (1/20/25), which omitted mention of Musk’s Nazi salute, read “Elon Musk Gives Exuberant Speech at Inauguration.” The following day, Post columnist Megan McArdle, echoing the ADL, downgraded Musk’s salute to an “awkward gesture,” the same phrase Post columnist Kathleen Parker used to dismiss those who saw something more sinister as “lemmings leaping in unison from a cliff” (Washington Post, 1/24/25).

Interestingly, one of the most vociferous “lemmings” was Post columnist Catherine Rampell, who brilliantly called out Musk’s Nazi salute, but on CNN, and noticeably not in the Post, except once in passing (1/30/25).

Musk responded to Rampell’s CNN appearance by threatening to sue her in a post (1/27/25) to his over 200 million X followers.

I noted at the top that Musk spent nearly $300 million to elect Trump, but that’s only part of the story. Musk also provided inestimable support by transforming X into a pro-Trump bullhorn. Personally, when I logged onto X during the campaign, I routinely saw Musk’s pro-Trump tweets at the top of my feed, even though I didn’t follow Musk at the time.

Since the election, Musk ’s gifts to Trump have continued. X recently agreed to pay Trump $10 million to settle Trump’s 2021 lawsuit against the company, even though the case was dismissed in 2022. Trump was still appealing the ruling two-and-a-half years later when a deal was cut. “The settlement talks with X began after the election and were more informal, with both Trump and Musk personally involved in hammering out the $10 million number,” the Wall Street Journal (2/13/25) reported.

‘Cheering for change’

New York Times (2/11/25): Many of the federal agencies targeted by Musk “were leading investigations, enforcement matters or lawsuits pending against Mr. Musk’s companies.”

It’s quite something for Elon Musk—the world’s richest human and one of the largest government contractors—to gleefully slash public spending benefiting others. Especially when, by one measure, “virtually all of his net worth can be pinned to government help,” CNN (11/20/24) reported.

While Musk claims to wield a populist’s pitchfork as he attacks “the bureaucracy,” a closer look reveals the work of an oligarch’s scalpel. Musk’s coup team—called DOGE, and consisting mostly of twentysomething male engineers, several of whom appear to share Musk’s racist ideology (New York Times, 2/7/25)—is targeting the federal agencies investigating Musk’s companies, which in addition to X, include Tesla and SpaceX.

“President Trump has been in office less than a month, and Elon Musk’s vast business empire is already benefiting—or is now in a decidedly better position to benefit,” read the opening lines of a New York Times story (2/11/25):

At least 11 federal agencies that have been affected by [Trump’s] moves have more than 32 continuing investigations, pending complaints or enforcement actions into Mr. Musk’s six companies.

While Trump claims Musk is “not gaining anything” from the arrangement, and Musk says the same, Wall Street sees things differently. Even as Musk says he’s turning his “efficiency” revolution to the Pentagon—the only federal agency never to pass an audit, and where any honest attempt to rein in government spending would begin—stocks for armsmaking companies associated with Musk are surging, while those without ties to him languish. “Palantir, as well as Musk’s SpaceX, OpenAI and robotics and AI specialist Anduril Industries, are cheering for change,” the Wall Street Journal (2/10/25) reported.

In other words, having seized control of the levers of government, an oligarch will now be directing funding to himself and his cronies. That’s Wall Street’s view, anyhow.

It seems to be Bezos’s as well. With Amazon and Blue Origin, Bezos’s space company, competing for billions in government contracts, it makes perfect business sense for Bezos to cozy up to Musk and Trump. From a journalistic perspective, however, it’s nothing short of a disaster, one that’s playing out daily in the pages of the Washington Post.

You can send a message to the Washington Post at letters@washpost.com (or via Bluesky: @washingtonpost.com).

Please remember that respectful communication is the most effective. Feel free to leave a copy of your message in the comments thread on FAIR.org.

 

Three Israeli men held by Hamas in the Gaza Strip were freed on Saturday, February 8,  in exchange for 183 Palestinian prisoners held by Israel. It was the latest round of captive releases stipulated by the January ceasefire deal that ostensibly paused Israel’s genocide in Gaza, launched in October 2023, the official Palestinian death toll of which has now reached nearly 62,000—although the true number of fatalities is likely quite a bit higher (FAIR.org, 2/5/25).

In all, 25 Israeli captives and the bodies of eight others were slated to be released over a six-week period, in exchange for more than 1,900 Palestinians imprisoned in Israel—the disproportionate ratio a reflection both of the vastly greater number of captives held by Israel and the superior value consistently assigned to Israeli life.

Hamas halted releases on Monday on account of Israel’s violations of the ceasefire agreement, with Reuters (2/10/25) oh-so-diplomatically noting that the “ceasefire…has largely held since it began on January 19, although there have been some incidents in which Palestinians have been killed by Israeli forces.”

But Saturday’s exchange offered a revealing view of the outsized role US corporate media play in the general dehumanization of the Palestinian people—an approach that conveniently coincides with the Middle East policy of the United States, which is predicated on the obsessive funneling of hundreds of billions of dollars in assistance and weaponry to Israel’s genocidal army. And now that President Donald Trump has decided that the US can take over Gaza by simply expelling its inhabitants, well, dehumanizing them may serve an even handier purpose.

Granted, it’s a lot easier for a news report to tell the individual stories of three people than to tell the stories of 183. But the relentless empathetic media attention to the three Israeli men—who, mind you, are not the ones currently facing a genocide—deliberately leaves little to no room for Palestinian victims of an Israeli carceral system that has for decades been characterized by illegal arbitrary detention, torture and in-custody death.

So it is that we learn the names and ages of the three Israelis, the names of their family members, and empathy-inducing details of their captivity and physical appearance, while the 183 Palestinians remain at best a side note, and at worst a largely faceless mass of newly freed terrorists.

‘Like Holocaust survivors’

Deep into this story, the New York Times (2/8/25) admits that many released Palestinian prisoners were also “in visibly poor condition”—but it doesn’t explain that both the Israeli and Palestinian prisoners were emaciated for the same reason: because Israel had deliberately deprived them of food.

Take, for example, the Saturday New York Times intervention (2/8/25) headlined “Hamas Makes Gaunt Israeli Hostages Thank Captors Before Release,” which recounts the plight of the “three frail, painfully thin hostages” who elicited the following comparison from Israeli foreign minister Gideon Saar: “The Israeli hostages look like Holocaust survivors.”

When we finally get around to the Palestinian prisoners, we are immediately informed that “at least some were convicted of involvement in deadly attacks against Israelis, who view them as terrorists.” Needless to say, such media outlets can rarely be bothered to profile Palestinian prisoners with less sensational biographies—like all the folks arbitrarily swept up in raids and never charged with a crime.

The article does acknowledge, more than 20 paragraphs later, that “many of the released Palestinian prisoners were in visibly poor condition,” too—albeit not meriting a comparison to Holocaust survivors—and that “Palestinian prisoners have recounted serious allegations of abuse in Israeli jails.” It also mentions that “Israeli forces raided the West Bank family homes of at least four of [the] men before their release, warning their relatives not to celebrate their freedom”—evidence, according to the Times, that Israel has simply been “particularly assertive in suppressing celebrations for detainees.”

And yet all of this “assertiveness” is implicitly justified when we are supplied with the biographical details of a handful of released detainees, who unlike the three Israelis are categorically ineligible for pure and unadulterated victimhood, consisting instead of the likes of 50-year-old Iyad Abu Shkhaydem, who “had been serving 18 life sentences, in part for planning the 2004 bombings of two buses in Beersheba, in central Israel, that killed 16 people.”

Of course, the corporate media are more interested in obscuring rather than supplying context, which is why we never find the New York Times and its ilk dwelling too critically on the possibility that Palestinian violence might be driven by, you know, Israel’s usurpation of Palestinian land, coupled with systematic ethnic cleansing and regular bouts of mass slaughter.

In the media’s view, the Hamas-led October 7, 2023, attacks that killed some 1,200 Israelis and saw more than 250 taken captive was just about the most savage, brutal thing to have ever happened. Never mind Israel’s behavior for the past 77 years, which includes killing nearly 8,000 Palestinians in the Gaza Strip from September 2000 through September 2023, according to the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem.

But that’s what happens when one side is appointed as human and the other is not—and when the US media takes its cues from a genocidal state whose officials refer to Palestinians as “human animals.”

‘Shocked Israelis’

This New York Times story (2/9/25) is not matched by one in which Palestinian captives “Give Glimpses of Ordeal”—but then, the Times doesn’t have a correspondent who’s married to a Palestinian PR agent, or who has a son who’s a fighter for Hamas.

On Sunday, the New York Times ran another article (2/9/25) on the “torment” the Israeli hostages had endured. Times Jerusalem correspondent Isabel Kershner managed to find space in it to discuss the “bright magenta track suit” worn by a female Israeli hostage released last month, but not much space to talk about Palestinians, aside from specifying that “some” of the prisoners slated for release were “convicted of killing Israelis.” (Kershner, it bears recalling, was called out by FAIR back in 2012 for utilizing her Times post to provide a platform for her husband’s Zionist propaganda outfit. In 2014, it was revealed that her son was in the Israeli military.)

While Kershner described the three Israelis released on Saturday as being in “emaciated condition,” many other media outlets opted for “gaunt.” Reuters (2/8/25) announced that the “gaunt appearance” of the three hostages had “shocked Israelis”—and reminded its audience that “some” of the 183 released Palestinians were “convicted of involvement in attacks that killed dozens of people.”

NBC News (2/9/25) also went with “gaunt,” as did CNN (2/9/25). But aside from common vocabulary, a recurring theme throughout media coverage of the prisoner exchanges is the sheer humanity infused into the Israeli characters: their suffering, their weepy reunions with their families, their heart-rending discoveries that certain loved ones have not survived. This same humanity is blatantly denied to Palestinians; after all, emotionally conditioning audiences to empathize with Israel’s enemies would run counter to US machinations abroad and the Orientalist media traditions that help sustain them.

Again, many of the media reports do acknowledge that quite a few released Palestinians were looking worse for the wear, had difficulty walking, or had to be transferred to hospital. But such information is not presented as “shocking” to anyone—perhaps because maltreatment and abuse of Palestinian prisoners is business as usual in Israel.

Conspicuously, the continuous invocation of the factoid that “some” released Palestinians had been convicted of killing Israelis is never accompanied by the corresponding note that “some” of the released Israelis happen to be active-duty soldiers in an army whose fundamental purpose is to kill and displace Palestinians. When individual hostages’ army service is mentioned, it is done so in a positive light—as in Kershner’s recounting of the uplifting aftermath of the January 25 release of 20-year-old soldier Daniella Gilboa: “Days later, she was singing at a party marking the discharge of the army lookouts from Beilinson Hospital near Tel Aviv.”

Weaponization of empathy

CNN‘s article (2/9/25) acknowledged that Israel “intentionally reduc[ed] food servings to Palestinian prisoners in what’s been described as the minimum required for survival”—but there’s no headline about “gaunt” Palestinian captives.

To be sure, the media’s effective weaponization of empathy is crucial given that Palestinians are killed by Israelis at an astronomically higher rate than Israelis are killed by Palestinians. Any objective comparison of fatalities or consideration of history unequivocally establishes Palestinians as victims of Israeli aggression—hence the need for the US politico-media establishment’s re-education campaign.

Meanwhile, speaking of “humanity,” a Telegraph article (2/8/25) published on the Yahoo! News website quoted Israeli President Isaac Herzog as detecting a “crime against humanity” in the appearance of the three men released on Saturday, who had returned from captivity “starved, emaciated and pained.” This from a leader of a country that has just bombed an entire territory and a whole lot of its people to bits, while also utilizing starvation as a weapon of war. Starvation is furthermore par for the course in Israeli prisons; as even CNN (2/9/25) observed in one its articles on Saturday’s “pale, gaunt Israeli hostages”:

The Israeli prison system has come under fire for intentionally reducing food servings to Palestinian prisoners in what’s been described as the minimum required for survival, on the orders of then National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir last year.

It brings back memories of that time in 2006 that Dov Weisglass, an adviser to the Israeli government, offered the following rationale for restricting food imports into Gaza: “The idea is to put the Palestinians on a diet, but not to make them die of hunger.”

In November 2023, the Associated Press reported that a 78-year-old female hostage released by Hamas had “said in an interview that she was initially fed well in captivity until conditions worsened and people became hungry.” In this case, the AP semi-connected the dots: “Israel has maintained a tight siege on Gaza since the war erupted, leading to shortages of food, fuel and other basic items.”

In other words, there’s no one but the Israeli government to thank for those shockingly “gaunt” faces—the Israeli ones in headlines and the Palestinians relegated to the bottom of stories. And with Israel gearing up to renew its genocidal onslaught with fanatical US encouragement, there are no doubt plenty of crimes against humanity yet to come.

 

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New York Times (1/29/25)

This week on CounterSpin: A number of federal agencies rushed to make clear they would be scrubbing activities and events that “celebrate cultural awareness” in an effort to stay on the good side of the weird new White House. Trump and his abettors’ anti-anti-discrimination agenda is as subtle as a sledgehammer. “DEI hire,” for instance, is super-complicated code for the idea that if a person who isn’t white, cis and male got a job, that can only mean a better qualified white cis man was unfairly denied it. That’s just, Trump says, “common sense.”

The irony is not lost that history itself is seen as being manipulated for political purpose when it comes to Black History Month—because we know that history is constantly invoked, if implicitly, as a way of justifying present-day unfairness. White supremacy can be presented as natural if  white people invented everything, discovered everything, created all the wealth, and defined civilization. That lies back of many public and media conversations…so just saying Charles Drew invented blood banks is disruptive! What if Black people aren’t subhuman?

What people try to silence tells us what they fear. So what is so scary about everyone, not just Black people, acknowledging the particular circumstances, and responses to those circumstances, of Black people in these United States—our experience, challenges, accomplishments? Is it that history—real history, and not comforting tall tales—connects the past with the present in ways that are powerful, grounding and inspiring?

In March 2021, a hitherto no-name right-wing activist openly declared an intention to mislead around racism and to vilify any questioning of enduring racial inequities: “The goal,” wrote Manhattan Institute’s Christopher Rufo,  “is to have the public read something crazy in the newspaper and immediately think ‘critical race theory.’” He bragged that he had “successfully frozen” the “brand” of critical race theory, and was “steadily driving up negative perceptions. We will eventually turn it toxic as we put all of the various cultural insanities under that brand category.”

A self-respecting press corps would have taken that as a shot across the bow. The corporate news media we have dutifully signed on to present a campaign openly defined as uninterested in truth or humanity and concerned only with rolling back the clock on racial equity as a totally valid, “grassroots” perspective, deserving respectful inclusion in national conversation.

That was a jumping-off point for our conversation with law professor Luke Charles Harris, co-founder with Kimberle Crenshaw of the African American Policy Forum. We’ll hear that important conversation again this week.

https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin250214Harris.mp3

 

Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look back at recent press coverage of Venezuela, Elon Musk and ICE.

https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin250214Banter.mp3

 

 

The murder of UnitedHealth Group executive Brian Thompson, and the subsequent arrest of Luigi Mangione, focused media and policymakers’ attention on the savage practices of private US health insurance. In the immediate aftermath, major media outlets scolded social media posters for mocking Thompson with sarcastic posts, such as “I’m sorry, prior authorization is required for thoughts and prayers.”

As public fury failed to subside, it began to dawn on at least some media organizations that the response to Thompson’s murder might possibly reflect deep, widespread anger at a healthcare system that collects twice as much money as those in other wealthy countries, makes it difficult for half the adult population to afford healthcare even when they’re supposedly “insured,” and maims, murders and bankrupts millions of people by denying payment when they actually try to use their alleged benefits. As Rep. Ro Khanna (D.–Calif.) said to ABC News  (12/8/24), “There is no justification for violence, but the outpouring afterwards has not surprised me.”

Any reporter, editor or pundit who writes regularly about healthcare and professes to be mystified or outraged by the public reaction to Thompson’s murder should take a deep look at their own assumptions, sources and professional behavior.

FAIR reviewed coverage of healthcare in the presidential election by the New York Times, Wall Street Journal and Washington Post, as well as KFF Health News (KHN), the leading outlet specializing in the healthcare issue, whose reporting is often picked up by corporate media. The coverage by these outlets amounts to little more than sophisticated public relations for this corporate healthcare killing machine and, especially, the Republican and Democratic politicians who created and nurture it.

The coverage was marred by many of the media failings FAIR has exposed since its inception. These outlets:

• took false major-party “facts” at face value and published candidates’ platitudes without challenging their substance;
• anointed former President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris as the only legitimate horses in the race, blacking out the content of third-party candidate proposals like “Medicare for All”; and
• added insult to injury by legitimizing their own failed coverage with analysis asking why there were no major healthcare reform proposals to cover.

Tsunami of fake good news

In March 2024, I reported (Healing and Stealing, 3/23/24) that Democrats were preparing to unleash a “tsunami of fake good news” about healthcare and the Affordable Care Act to try to influence media coverage of the campaign.

Major media fell for it hook, line and sinker. No campaign tactic and media failure did more to lengthen the distance between a public brutalized by a failing healthcare system and an out-of-touch corporate media.

President Joe Biden (until he dropped out) and Harris spun a narrative of “progress” under the Affordable Care Act to attract voters. The progress narrative relied on two new healthcare policy “records”: a record-low uninsurance rate and record-high Obamacare enrollment.

In a story on why “big, prominent plans for health reform are nowhere to be seen,” the New York Times’ Margot Sanger-Katz (9/13/24) explained that the “overall state of the health system” is different than in 2019 for several reasons, including that the “uninsured rate is near a record low.”

The New York Times (1/10/24) reported that signups for the ACA set a “record”—but not that this was less than the number of people who had been kicked off Medicaid.

KHN’s Phil Galewitz (9/10/24) similarly reported:

Before Congress passed the ACA in 2010, the uninsured rate had been in double digits for decades. The rate fell steadily under Barack Obama but reversed under President Donald Trump, only to come down again under President Joe Biden.

Meanwhile, insurance plans sold on the Affordable Care Act exchanges reached a record enrollment of 21 million in early 2024, or, as the Times’ Noah Weiland (1/10/24) put it, “blowing by the previous record and elevating the health and political costs of a repeal.”

The two “facts” are both distorted and largely irrelevant to people’s actual experience of the healthcare system. As Galewitz acknowledged, because of survey lags, the uninsurance data don’t reflect the 2023–24 disenrollment of some 25 million from Medicaid, the joint federal/state insurance program for low-income Americans, which had been temporarily expanded under Covid.

But the Medicaid disenrollment is reflected in the record signups to Obamacare, where some of those who lost Medicaid coverage fled in 2024. Yet according to KHN, 6 million of the 25 million people who lost Medicaid coverage became uninsured. Most of them haven’t yet been captured in uninsured data, allowing the Democrats to have their cake and eat it too.

The fact that the uninsured data likely understate uninsurance by as much as 6 million people escaped most political coverage—the Washington Post’s Dan Diamond (9/11/24), for example, added no caveats when reporting that the Biden administration

had released data showing that nearly 50 million Americans have obtained health coverage through the Affordable Care Act’s health insurance exchanges since they were established more than a decade ago, helping lower the national uninsured rate to record lows in recent years.

The Times‘ Sanger-Katz (9/13/24) likewise failed to mention it.

Private insurance ≠ healthcare 

The lesson Kamala Harris learned, according to the Washington Post (9/11/24), is that “incremental change, not a sweeping overhaul, is the best path to improving US healthcare.”

Far more importantly, the rate of uninsurance no longer measures whether or not people have adequate healthcare, or are protected from financial ruin if they get sick or injured. Data show that people who supposedly have insurance can’t get healthcare, rendering the raw uninsurance rate a relatively meaningless measure of the burden of the crisis-stricken US healthcare system.

National surveys by the Commonwealth Fund every two years include one of the few comprehensive attempts to measure underinsurance, and the impact of medical costs on people nominally “covered.” In 2022, Commonwealth found that 46% of adults aged 19–64 skipped needed medical treatment due to out-of-pocket costs. That number included 44% of adults buying insurance through ACA exchanges or the individual insurance market—even with the much-hyped expanded premium subsidies in place.

Commonwealth didn’t release its 2024 surveys until November 21, well after Election Day. During the last two years of the Biden/Harris administration, the percentage of working age adults skipping medical care due to costs increased from 46% to 48%, no matter the source of coverage (Healing and Stealing, 11/21/24).

When people with private insurance do attempt to get healthcare, their insurers often refuse to pay for care. The slain Brian Thompson was CEO of UnitedHealth Group’s insurance subsidiary. According to an analysis of federal data by ValuePenguin (5/15/24), a consumer website run by online lender LendingTree, UnitedHealthcare denied 32% of claims submitted to its ACA and individual market plans in 2022, the highest rate in the industry.

Corporate media political reporters usually delivered the misleading progress narrative “facts” without reference to this critical context. The Washington Post’s Dan Diamond (9/11/24), explaining that Harris learned “the importance of incremental progress” as vice president after retreating from support for Medicare for All, noted the administration’s achievement of “record levels of health coverage through the Affordable Care Act,” with no reference to the Medicaid purge or underinsurance.

Substance-free coverage of a substance-free campaign 

New York Times (9/13/24): “After years of crises and emergencies, no part of the system is currently ablaze.”

The New York Times’ Margot Sanger-Katz wrote in “The Campaign Issue That Isn’t: Healthcare Reform” (9/13/24):

As you may have noticed, with less than two months until Election Day, big, prominent plans for health reform are nowhere to be seen. Even in an election that has been fairly light on policy proposals, healthcare’s absence is notable.

It’s true that neither Harris nor Trump offered any concrete proposals for improving US healthcare. Harris campaigned on “strengthening” the ACA, but her only specific “improvement” was a promise to support keeping the expanded subsidies that help people pay their ACA health insurance premiums—passed in the first year of Biden’s term—from expiring as scheduled next year. In other words, “strengthen” the ACA by maintaining its dismal status quo.

As for Trump, the Times’ Weiland (8/12/24) reported that the authors of Project 2025, the consensus right-wing NGO blueprint published by the Heritage Foundation, “were not calling for a repeal of the Affordable Care Act.” At the debate, Trump said he wouldn’t repeal unless he had a better plan, and drew mockery for saying he had “concepts of a plan.”

Ultimately, mass deportation was his primary healthcare policy (Healing and Stealing, 10/16/24, 9/10/24); the RNC Platform maintained that undocumented immigrants were the cause of high healthcare costs. (It’s nonsense. Undocumented taxpayers actually paid more in taxes that were earmarked specifically for healthcare in 2022 than the estimated total cost of healthcare for all undocumented immigrants in the US.)

What you see depends on where you look 

One reason Sanger-Katz and colleagues had a hard time finding “big” plans for healthcare is that she and her colleagues chose to look for them only in the two major parties’ platforms.

Whether Eugene Debs campaigning for Social Security from prison in 1920, Henry Wallace fighting for desegregation after walking out of the 1948 Democratic convention, or Cynthia McKinney proposing an end to the Afghan War in 2008, third-party candidates have a long track record of promoting policies dismissed as unrealistic ideological fantasies that later become consensus policy. Yet corporate media outlets repeat the same failure to pay attention every four years (FAIR.org, 10/23/08).

Green Party candidate Jill Stein, the only medical doctor in the race, supported Medicare for All as a

precursor to establishing a British-style National Healthcare Service which will replace private hospitals, private medical practice and private medical insurance with a publicly owned, democratically controlled healthcare service that will guarantee healthcare as a human right to everyone in the United States.

Stein placed special emphasis on taking “the pharmaceutical industry into public ownership and democratic control.”

Justice for All Party candidate Cornel West’s Health Justice agenda also envisioned a system “Beyond Medicare for All,” including “nationalization of healthcare industries.”

Prior to suspending his campaign and endorsing Trump, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. told Jacobin (6/9/23) he would keep private insurance for those who want it, but also have a public program “available to everybody.” Although he used the phrase “single-payer,” Kennedy described a program most similar to a voluntary “public option,” an untested idea whose ultimate impact on the breadth, depth and cost of coverage remains speculative.

Outside the world inhabited by elite media, Medicare for All is a fiscally modest proposal that receives consistent support among large segments of the US population, reaching majorities depending on the wording of poll questions (KFF, 10/26/20). In 2022, the Congressional Budget Office (2/22) estimated that a single-payer system with no out-of-pocket costs for doctor visits or hospital care, minimal copays for prescription drugs, and doctor and hospital prices at the current average would cover everyone for all medical conditions—including services that are almost never fully covered, like vision, dental and hearing—and still lower expected total national health expenditures by about a half a percent.

Even with candidates in the race proposing even broader expansion of the public role in healthcare, through nationalizing hospitals and drug manufacturing, Medicare for All remains beyond the boundary of acceptable corporate media debate. This has been true for 30 years, when FAIR (Extra!, 1–2/94) reported on media coverage of the failed Clinton administration healthcare reform effort.

Just one election cycle back, during the Democratic primaries, multiple candidates—led by Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, but also including Kamala Harris—supported Medicare for All, and media were forced to cover it, generally with considerable hostility (FAIR.org, 3/20/19, 4/29/19, 10/2/19). But with Harris backing away from it entirely, media found themselves returning to a place of comfortably ignoring the popular proposal.

Missing Medicare for All

Leading papers covered third parties as potential spoilers, but not as potential sources of new ideas (Washington Post, 3/14/24).

FAIR searched the Nexis, ProQuest and Dow Jones databases, and the websites of the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal and KFF Health News, for election or healthcare policy stories and podcasts mentioning different iterations of “Medicare for All,” “single-payer” and “universal healthcare,” between January 1 and Election Day 2024. We found 89 news and 107 opinion pieces.

Ninety percent of the news articles came after Biden dropped out of the race. The coverage overwhelmingly focused on Harris’s reversal of her brief support for Medicare for All in 2019, with 96% of these stories mentioning her shift.

The ubiquitous Republican claim that Harris sought to give undocumented people free Medicare was based on the obviously false premise that Harris had not abandoned support for Medicare for All. Asked in 2019 whether her support for universal health insurance would include eligibility for undocumented immigrants, she said yes (New York Times, 10/30/24). Since that time, Harris has repudiated Medicare for All, and no Democrat has advocated enrolling the 11 million undocumented immigrants in Medicare, let alone for “free.”

KHN (8/1/24) and the New York Times (10/30/24) corrected this GOP distortion, but all four outlets left readers hard-pressed to learn any other details of Medicare for All, or other meaningful alternatives to the status quo, especially not any proposed by other candidates.

All four outlets wrote frequently about whether third-party candidates might siphon votes from Trump or Harris (e.g., Wall Street Journal, 11/10/23; Washington Post, 3/14/24; New York Times, 10/14/24). However, they blacked out the content of those parties’ healthcare policy positions, leaving readers with no information to help them decide if voting for a candidate other than Trump or Harris might benefit them.

Voters in the dark

In 2,000 words on “Where Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Stands on the Issues,” the New York Times (6/14/24) avoided any discussion of where he stands on major healthcare reform issues.

The New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal and KHN frequently mentioned one or more of the third-party candidates in other political coverage as a threat to the major-party candidates. But out of the 89 news articles bringing up Medicare for All, single-payer or universal healthcare, only three included third-party candidates at all, each one in passing as possible spoilers. Exactly zero offered any information at all about the candidates’ healthcare proposals.

For example, the New York Times published 34 news articles and podcasts mentioning a version of Medicare for All or single-payer, without a single word on the healthcare proposals of the third-party candidates who remained after Kennedy’s endorsement of Trump. One article (10/24/24) included a passing Stein spoiler reference. Another (8/22/24), on Harris’s commitment to “the art of the possible,” quoted West’s vice presidential running mate, Melina Abdullah, criticizing Harris for shifting many of her policy positions, but again without reference to West and Abdullah’s proposals for healthcare.

Times readers were more likely to get news about the healthcare reform positions of foreign political leaders than non–major-party candidates running for president of the United States. The paper ran six stories about Indonesia (2/12/24, 2/15/24, 10/19/24), Thailand (2/18/24) and South Africa (6/3/24, 6/7/24) that mentioned a politician’s position on “universal healthcare,” while blacking out discussion of third-party candidates’ healthcare proposals, except to some degree for Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

Before leaving the race, Kennedy’s half-baked notions about vaccines, activism on environmental health and food safety, and criticism of Covid lockdowns received frequent mention, but as with the other third-party candidates, his views on major healthcare reform issues went missing, including from a 2,000-word Times analysis of “Where Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Stands on the Issues” (6/14/24).

The third-party healthcare blackout was even tighter in the Washington Post. The 38 Post news articles mentioning Medicare for All or single-payer had only one reference to Stein or West—a quote from West unrelated to healthcare (8/21/24). The Post never reported either candidate’s healthcare proposals. A webpage on which reporters tracked third-party ballot access offered a short “Pitch to Voters” for each party that included no healthcare policy.

Medicare for All spin and bad facts

Like Democrats, the New York Times‘ Noah Weiland (8/22/24) largely avoided talking about what Medicare for All would do.

The four outlets’ descriptions of Medicare for All, single payer and universal healthcare were nearly as sparse as coverage of third-party candidates’ healthcare positions, and as distorted as reporting on the ACA. Only 23 of the 89 news stories included any description at all of these policies, the overwhelming majority of them a brief phrase in the reporter’s own words.

Only three New York Times stories included any Medicare for All substance, and these were barely intelligible. The most extensive was an article debunking Trump’s claims that Harris continued to support the policy, in which Noah Weiland (8/22/24) wrote nearly 1,300 words without explaining what the Medicare for All is or would do. Readers wouldn’t know that the current Medicare for All bills before Congress would cover everyone in the country with no out-of-pocket costs, and free choice of doctors and hospitals. They would, however, have learned that Harris “proposed a less sweeping plan” in 2019, which would include “a role for private plans.”

Weiland treated readers to what may be the most emphatic recitation of the ACA progress narrative. Biden’s pursuit of a “more traditional set of healthcare priorities” has yielded “explosive growth” in the ACA exchanges, he wrote. According to unnamed experts, that growth, and changes to Medicare and Medicaid, have “complicated” pursuit of Medicare for All.

Times readers would also have learned that expanding Medicaid is an incremental step toward Medicare for All, what bill supporter Rep. Ed Markey says is part of the policy’s “DNA.” In reality, Medicaid’s eligibility standards are literally the opposite of Medicare for All—means-tested coverage that requires you to prove you’re appropriately impoverished every year, and which disappears if you get a big enough raise at your job.

The vast majority of Times coverage of Medicare for All included no content whatsoever, simply mentioning it as a policy that Harris once supported, with the occasional political characterization (7/24/24) that it was one of her since-abandoned “left-leaning positions that can now leave her vulnerable to attack from Republicans.”

‘A proposal that worried many Americans’

Washington Post factchecker Glenn Kessler (9/9/24) said it was mostly true that Medicare for All would “raise taxes [and] increase national debt,” citing studies of Bernie Sanders’ plan that “estimated that national health expenditures would rise over 10 years.” He didn’t note that CBO found that under most single-payer plans, national health expenditures would rise—but much less than they would under the status quo.

Eleven of the 36 Washington Post stories in our sample published after Biden’s withdrawal made some substantive policy comment about Medicare for All, all but three in a single passing phrase. Every article except one said that Medicare for All would “abolish” or replace private insurance, sometimes noting private insurance would be replaced by a “government” plan—using the industry-preferred framing instead of the more neutral descriptor “public.” In the majority of stories, this was the only substantive point made about Medicare for All.

The Post‘s Glenn Kessler (9/9/24) “factchecked” Republican claims that Medicare for All would “raise taxes, increase national debt and functionally eliminate private health insurance.” Calling it “mostly true,” Kessler cited the figure of $32.6 trillion over 10 years, and claimed that “four of the five key studies on the effect of the Sanders plan estimated that national health expenditures would rise over 10 years.”

Kessler skipped a big fact. When the CBO insisted that raising the minimum wage would cause 1.4 million lost jobs, his editors (4/18/21) indignantly defended the agency as “admirably apolitical.” But Kessler neglected to mention that the “nonpartisan scorekeepers” at the CBO (12/10/20) found that four of the five versions of single-payer healthcare that they analyzed would raise national health expenditures, but by significantly less  than preserving the status quo.

Healthcare reporter Dan Diamond (9/11/24) wrote the Post’s most detailed take on Harris’s about-face on a plan “to eliminate private insurance, a proposal that worried many Americans who feared losing access to their doctors.” Diamond managed not to let readers know that, in contrast to private insurance plans that penalize patients for seeing “out-of-network” doctors, Medicare for All would free patients to see any doctor they want without financial penalty.

Diamond added that Harris pulled back from Medicare for All because “polls across 2019 found that many Americans were worried that shifting to a national government-run health system could delay access to care,” without mentioning that half of all American working adults already skip treatments altogether every year (Commonwealth, 11/24).

Voters’ 2019 “worries” were likely stimulated in part by a multi-million-dollar lobbying and advertising blitz by the hospital, insurance and pharmaceutical industries, reported on by the Post‘s Jeff Stein (4/12/19), and based on the same distortions and inaccuracies Diamond and Kessler repeated five years later (Public Citizen, 6/28/19).

In a story (Washington Post, 4/3/20) on Sen. Bernie Sanders supporting the Biden/Harris administration’s drug cost control policies, Diamond reported that during the 2020 primaries, Sanders “argued that Medicare for All would help rein in high drug costs by forcing pharmaceutical companies to negotiate with the government.” It was the only positive framing of Medicare for All we could find in the Post’s coverage. Biden and Harris have done exactly what Sanders proposed, although to date they’ve only negotiated lower prices for 10 drugs, the prices won’t take effect for another year, and they only apply to our current “Medicare for Some.”

Expert content suppression 

KFF’s website limited its discussion of candidates’ healthcare proposals to the “viable contenders”—a choice that excluded virtually all ideas for improving the US healthcare system.

No outlet ignored the third-party candidates’ healthcare proposals more firmly, or took the tiny increments proposed by the major parties more seriously, than the one best equipped to inform the public about the state of US healthcare: KFF Health News.

KHN is a subsidiary of what used to be known as the Kaiser Family Foundations, but now goes by the acronym KFF. Founded with money from the family of steel magnate Henry Kaiser, tax-exempt KFF occupies a unique role as both news outlet and major source for healthcare information, calling itself “a one-of-a-kind information organization.”

KFF’s research and polling arms publish a large volume of detailed data and analysis of healthcare policy, covered widely in the media. This work lends additional credibility to KHN’s respected and widely republished news reporting.

With a staff of 71 reporters, editors, producers and administrators, as of November 1, KHN is devoted entirely to healthcare. Unlike taxpaying competitors like Modern Healthcare and Healthcare Dive—which regularly cover KFF’s research output—KHN publishes without a paywall, and permits reprints without charge. KHN forms partnerships with outlets of all sizes and focus, from an in-depth investigative series on medical debt with NPR and CBS News, to providing regular policy and political reporting to the physician-targeted website Medscape.

Excluding opinion articles, letters to the editor and brief daily newsletter blurbs linking to other outlets’ content, FAIR’s searches yielded just five KHN news stories from January 1 to Election Day that referred to Medicare for All, single-payer or universal healthcare. Two were state-focused—a one-paragraph mention of a proposed California single-payer bill in a broader legislative round-up (4/24/24), and a profile (7/15/24) of Anthony Wright, newly appointed executive director of the DC nonprofit Families USA.

The remaining three (7/21/24, 8/1/24, 9/11/24) were passing mentions without substance. KHN went the entire year without once mentioning Jill Stein or Cornel West.

KHN’s news coverage appeared to follow the lead of its affiliated research entity. KFF published a web page to “Compare the Candidates on Healthcare Policy,” last updated October 8, that declared

the general election campaign is underway, spotlighting former President Trump, the Republican nominee, and Vice President Harris, the Democratic nominee, as the viable contenders for the presidency.

The comparisons highlighted the differences rather than the similarities, and included without context the standard claim that the Biden/Harris “administration achieved record-high enrollment in ACA Marketplace plans.”

KFF had long since decided that discussion of Medicare for All is over. President Drew Altman told the New York Times (8/22/24) that KFF stopped polling on Medicare for All after the 2020 primaries because “there hasn’t been debate about it.” Yet pollsters regularly ask voters about healthcare issues that have no immediate chance of passage. The AP has asked people for a quarter century if they think it’s the federal government’s responsibility to “make sure all Americans have healthcare coverage,” and the Pew Research Center and other organizations have polled on abortion for decades, even when federal legislation was extremely unlikely.

The lack of “debate” about Medicare for All or single-payer is a flimsy excuse for blinkered coverage. In fact, KHN and the other outlets all ignored major healthcare reform stories with looming deadlines for action by the incoming president—federal approval for state-level reform (Healthcare Dive, 4/24/24). California and Oregon passed laws in 2023 instructing their governors to seek federal permission to dramatically restructure their state healthcare systems, including formation of a single-payer system in Oregon. Negotiations were supposed to begin in the first half of this year. None of these four agenda-setting outlets asked 2024 presidential candidates whether they planned to flex White House power to help major state-level reforms.

Complicit in mass death

All four of these outlets have done detailed reporting on some aspects of the extraordinarily expensive mass-killing machine that passes for the US “healthcare system.” Claims denials, aggressive collections, medical debt and massively inflated prices have all graced their pages.

But when it comes to political coverage, reporters and editors refuse to use their knowledge to challenge candidates effectively. The public’s experiences disappear, as journalists regurgitate bad facts and focus on self-evidently meaningless “proposals” framed by corporate power within their insular Beltway cultural bubble.

UnitedHealth Group executive Brian Thompson’s murder exposed the degree to which that behavior makes them complicit in mass death.

 

Donald Trump is back in the White House, and faux opposition is once again the order of the day for the Western media and the Democratic Party. Whether it comes to criminalizing migrants (FAIR.org, 1/25/25), maintaining US “soft power” via USAID, downplaying anti-democratic power grabs (FAIR.org, 2/4/25) or whitewashing Nazi salutes (FAIR.org, 1/23/25), the centrist establishment seems quite content to normalize Trump or even outflank him from the right.

There is, of course, no area of greater consensus than US imperial grand strategy, from waging genocidal war in Palestine (FAIR.org, 1/30/25) to recolonizing Washington’s “backyard” south of the Rio Grande. Accumulation by laying waste to the societies of the global South via carpet bombing and/or economic siege warfare is, according to anti-imperialist political economist Ali Kadri, the name of the game.

Venezuela is no exception to this multi-pronged onslaught. And the US empire’s “paper of record,” the New York Times, proudly leads the charge, most recently advocating the overthrow of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro “through coercive diplomacy if possible or force if necessary.”

High on his own (imperial) supply

Bret Stephens (New York Times, 1/14/25): “Ending Maduro’s long reign of terror is a good way to start [the Trump] administration—and send a signal to tyrants elsewhere that American patience with disorder and danger eventually runs out.”

In a column belligerently titled “Depose Maduro,” New York Times columnist Bret Stephens (1/14/25) made an overt case for US military intervention to topple Venezuela’s government. He hailed this textbook crime of aggression as “overdue, morally right and in our national security interest.”

For the Times’ self-described “warmongering neocon,” that last point is characteristically paramount. Specifically, he asserted that US “national security” requires “putting an end to a criminal regime that is a source of drugs, mass migration and Iranian influence in the Americas.”

The irony that during the 1980s, the Central Intelligence Agency actually facilitated the trafficking of cocaine to working-class Black communities in the context of the Iran/Contra scandal (FAIR.org, 12/29/24) was evidently lost on the Times columnist.

Then as today, the principal drug routes to the United States cut across the Pacific rather than the Gulf of Mexico (FAIR.org, 9/24/19). A 2017 DEA report found that less than 10% of US-bound cocaine flowed through Venezuela’s eastern Caribbean corridor, with WOLA reaching a similar conclusion in a 2020 study.

Not only does the bulk of drug trafficking flow through US-allied countries, but the US government itself is broadly complicit in the perpetuation of the multi-billion dollar contraband, as evidenced in its support for narco puppet regimes in Afghanistan (New York Times, 7/27/08) and Honduras (FAIR.org, 3/20/24; Covert Action, 3/14/24).

In marked contrast, the US has levied “narco-terrorism” charges against top Caracas officials, going as far as to place a bounty on Maduro’s head, without providing a shred of evidence, since Western outlets are happy to take US officials’ word, no questions asked (BBC, 1/10/25; New York Times, 1/10/25; Washington Post, 1/10/25; AP, 1/10/25).

Stephens lamented that Washington’s murderous economic sanctions “didn’t work” and that its bounty “also won’t work.” The columnist conveniently ignored that the unilateral coercive measures, described aptly by US officials as “maximum pressure,” were quite effective in deliberately gutting Venezuela’s economy, in the process killing at least tens of thousands, and spurring the migrant exodus he pointed to as justification for his proposed military adventure.

Such omission regarding US responsibility for Venezuelan migration is by now a staple of corporate media coverage (New York Times, 1/31/25; PBS, 1/31/25; CBS, 2/2/25). Indeed, support for Washington’s economic terrorism against Venezuela has been fairly uniform across the US political spectrum for years (FAIR.org, 6/4/20, 6/4/21, 5/2/22, 6/13/22).

Common tactics include describing sanctions as merely affecting Maduro and allies (New York Times, 1/6/25; NPR, 1/10/25; Al Jazeera, 1/6/25; Financial Times, 1/31/25) or portraying their consequences as merely the demonized leader’s opinion (New York Times, 1/31/25; BBC, 1/10/25; Reuters, 1/27/25).

The Iranian bogeyman

Stephens cites a story (Infobae, 1/10/25) about an Iranian “drone development base” in Venezuela that offers as its only source for the claim that “there is information” about such a base.

It is no surprise, either, that in Stephens’ casus belli, Iran appears alongside the familiar conservative tropes of Latin American migrant hordes and narcotics threatening the US (white settler) body politic.

Stephens’ Orientalist fixation with the Iranian bogeyman is notable, if hardly novel. Western media have in recent years circulated baseless rumors of Iran covertly shipping military equipment to Venezuela (FAIR.org, 6/10/20), and the Times in particular has promoted equally evidence-free claims of drug trafficking by Iranian ally Hezbollah (FAIR.org, 5/24/19, 2/4/21).

In the latest whopper, Stephens cited Iran having “reportedly established a ‘drone development base’” at a Venezuelan air base. However, this story comes from rabidly anti-Venezuelan government outlet Infobae (1/10/25), which did not even bother describing its anonymous source. The report only vaguely stated that “there is information” about this purported base.

Regardless of whether there is any truth to the alleged defense cooperation between the two sovereign nations, the perceived threat is, following the late Edward Said, symptomatic of Western imperialism’s enduring obsession with the “loss of Iran” in the wake of the 1979 overthrow of the Shah. Like the Chinese Revolution before it, Iran’s Islamic Revolution is still decades later portrayed as a global civilizational menace.

But the effort to update the “axis of evil” with a revised cast of rogue states from Venezuela to Iran also crucially serves to manufacture consent for military aggression against Tehran, which has long been the ultimate dream of significant segments of the US political class and intelligentsia, including Stephens (FAIR.org, 10/25/24).

On elections and ‘tropical despotisms’ 

In Stephens’ tropical gunboat diplomacy redux, there was something for everyone, even bleeding-heart “liberals” horrified that Venezuelan President Maduro supposedly “stole the election, terrorizes his opponents and brutalizes his people.”

As always, US imperialist intervention ideologically hinges on denying the Bolivarian government’s democratic credentials, most recently regarding the outcome of the July 28, 2024, presidential vote (Venezuelanalysis, 8/22/24, 7/29/24). However, Washington’s blockade ensured that the elections would never be free and fair. As the main factor driving economic hardship and migration, US sanctions meant Venezuelans headed to the polls with a gun to their heads, not unlike Nicaraguans in 1990.

It is the height of hypocrisy for US officials and their corporate media stenographers to claim the right to arbitrate other sovereign nations’ democratic legitimacy, even as they advance fascism at home and genocidal war across the globe. That sectors of the Western “compatible left” echo Stephens and his ilk, caricaturing the Maduro government as a “corrupt” and “repressive” regime, is unfortunate but not surprising (Ebb, 10/3/24).

The core racial assumption, going back to the 19th century, is that Global South states that refuse to bow to Western imperialist diktat constitute “tropical despotisms” to be toppled in a never-ending “civilizing mission,” with its anti-Communist, “war on terror” and neo-Orientalist mutations.

Demolishing the Death Star

Extra! (1–2/90): “In covering the invasion of Panama, many TV journalists abandoned even the pretense of operating in a neutral, independent mode.”

It is noteworthy that the script for Stephens’ Rambo sequel is over 35 years old: Stephens argued for “US military intervention of the sort that in 1990 swiftly ended the regime of the Panamanian strongman Manuel Noriega.” Formerly US-backed narco dictator Noriega was, not incidentally, an ex-CIA agent involved in Iran/Contra (Extra!, 1–2/90; FAIR.org, 12/29/24).

The New York Times warmonger-in-chief’s rendering of the intervention is fantastically selective, forgetting that the Central American nation was already “pre-invaded” by US military bases, and that the savage bombing of the Afro-Panamanian neighborhood of El Chorrillo transformed it into “Little Hiroshima.”

But the sober reality is that Venezuela is not Panama. Venezuela’s Bolivarian Armed Forces, alongside other corps, like the Bolivarian Militia, have spent a quarter of a century preparing for a “prolonged people’s war of resistance” against the US empire at the level of doctrine, organization, equipment and training.

If the US and its Zionist colonial outpost failed to defeat the heroic Palestinian resistance in Gaza after nearly 500 days of genocidal war, an asymmetric conflict with a significantly larger and stronger force, across a territory more than 2,000 times as large, is not likely a serious proposition.

Nonetheless, it is the duty of all those residing in the imperialist core to grind Washington’s industrial-scale death machine to a definitive halt. This paramount strategic objective demands systematically deposing the New York Times’ Goebbelsian propaganda.

 

Janine Jackson interviewed TLDEF’s Ezra Young about trans rights law for the February 7, 2025, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

 

https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin250207Young.mp3

 

NBC News (2/4/25)

Janine Jackson: Transgender youth, families and advocates are filing lawsuits, pushing back on Trump executive orders that define sex as biological and “grounded in incontrovertible reality,” and that prohibit federal funding of transition-related healthcare for those under 19, including by medical schools and hospitals that receive federal research or education grants. According to a report by Jo Yurcaba at NBC Out, that latter order contained language claiming that “countless children soon regret that they have been mutilated,” and that they wind up “trapped with lifelong medical complications” and “a losing war with their own bodies.”

This accompanies orders prohibiting trans people from joining the military, and from receiving transition care while incarcerated, and then just yesterday, a move to ban trans women from women’s sports. It’s evident what Trump and his ilk want to do, but is it legal? And even if it’s not, what impacts could it still have?

Ezra Young is a civil rights attorney whose litigation and scholarship center on trans rights. He’s been visiting assistant law professor at Cornell Law School, director of impact litigation at the Transgender Legal Defense and Education Fund, and legal director at African American Policy Forum, among other things. He joins us now by phone from Charlottesville, Virginia. Welcome back to CounterSpin, Ezra Young.

Ezra Young: Thank you so much for the invitation.

JJ: Ground us, please, with some basic understanding. Discrimination based on gender identity is illegal. That’s established, isn’t it?

EY: Yes, it is. Gender identity is a newer term, but is essentially equivalent to sex. Federal law prohibits discrimination on the basis of sex, both under our Constitution, as well as under many statutes.

JJ: And it’s also established that the White House or Trump doesn’t have, really, the legal power or the authority to carry out these moves that these orders indicate, right?

EY: Correct. So this is just basic constitutional law, like I would teach my first-year law students; any one of them would be able to spot this. Under our Constitution, our government is one of limited powers. Those powers for the presidency are delineated in Article Two. The responsibility of the US president is to execute and enforce laws that are passed by Congress, not to make up new laws, and most definitely not to infringe upon the rights that are protected by the United States Constitution.

JJ: Right. Well, we know that the law saying they can’t do something doesn’t necessarily mean—we can already see that it hasn’t meant—that nothing happens, including things that can deeply affect people’s lives, even if they aren’t legal. So accepting that grayness, what should we be concerned about here?

Cut (2/4/25)

EY: Well, first and foremost, I’d push back on the sense that there’s grayness. This is a situation where there’s black and white. Our Constitution, which I firmly believe in, enough so that I’m an expert in constitutional law and I teach it, limits what a president can do.

So let me contrast this with the president’s power when it comes to immigration. There’s a lot of power in the president when it comes to immigration, because that’s an issue over which our Constitution gives him power. But our Constitution is one of the government of limited powers, meaning if power isn’t expressly provided via the Constitution, the president can’t just make up that power. So for folks who think the president is doing something unconstitutional, or insists he has powers he doesn’t have, the best thing to do is to push back and say absolutely no.

Part of what we’re seeing right now, with some local hospitals in New York and elsewhere essentially trying to comply in advance, in the hope to appease Trump if one day he does have the power to do what he says he’s doing, that’s absolutely wrongheaded. We don’t, and no one should. That was why our country was founded. Despite all the sins on which it was founded, a good reason why we were founded was to make sure that the people retained the vast majority of the power. And when politicians, including the United States president, pretend they have more power than they do, it’s our responsibility as citizens and residents of this nation to push back and say no.

JJ: I appreciate that, and that the law is not itself vague, but that with folks complying in advance, as you say, and with this just sort of general confusion, we know that a law doesn’t have to actually pass in order for harms to happen, in order for the real world to respond to these calls, as we’re seeing now. So it’s important to distinguish the fact that the law is in opposition to all of this, and yet here we see people already acting as though somehow it were justified or authorized, which is frightening.

EY: It is frightening, and I think, again, that goes to our responsibility as Americans. Citizens or not, if you’re here, you’re an American, and you’re protected by the Constitution. It’s our responsibility to push back people who are all too ready to take steps against the trans community, against trans people, just like all of the other minority groups President Trump is trying to subjugate, and to insist: “Hey, stop. You’re not required to do this. If you’re choosing to do this, that’s a problem.”

JJ: We are seeing resistance, both these lawsuits and protests in the street, I feel like more today than yesterday, and probably more tomorrow than today. Do you think that folks are activated enough, that they see things clearly? What other resistance would you like to see?

Ezra Young: “If Trump were to put out an executive order today declaring the sky is purple, that doesn’t change the reality that the sky is not purple.”

EY: I think protests are a great way for folks who might not know a lot of these issues, or might have limited capacities, so they’re not lawyers, they’re not educators, they’re not doctors, but they’re people who care. That’s a great way to push back, put your name and faith and body on the line, and to show you don’t agree with this.

In addition to that, I would suggest that people read these executive orders and know what they say and know what they don’t say. When I say, right now, for the trans community, complying in advance is one of the biggest problems we’re seeing, I mean it. I’ve been on dozens of calls with members of the trans community, including trans lawyers at large organizations and law firms, people who work for the federal government, who are not what my grandfather would call “using their thinking caps” right now. They’re thinking in a place of fear, and they’re not reading. They’re not thinking critically.

If Trump were to put out an executive order today declaring the sky is purple, that doesn’t change the reality that the sky is not purple. We don’t need to pretend that is the reality. We can just call it out for what it is, utter nonsense.

Beyond that, I would say people should not change anything about the way they live their life or go about the world, simply out of fear that something will be done to them that no one has the power to do.

I can say—it’s kind of funny—I was at a really conservative federal court last year, and I lost my passport. I thought I was going to find it again, but I didn’t, and then I got busy with work, and Trump came into office. So I finally got my stuff together, and applied for a new passport. A lot of people in my community were concerned that I wasn’t going to get a passport, and all I could think was: “I read all of the rules. I read all of the executive orders. There’s nothing that says I can’t get my passport.” I’m not home in Ithaca, New York, right now, but my understanding is my passport was delivered yesterday.

JJ: OK, so just going forward, people think media critics hate journalists, when really we just hate bad journalism, which there has been a fair amount of around trans issues; but there are also some brighter spots and some improvements, like one you saw out of what might seem an unlikely place. Would you tell us a little about that?

North Dakota Monitor (1/28/25)

EY: One of my friends, Brittany Stewart, of an organization called Gender Justice, which is based in Minnesota, brought a lawsuit against the state of North Dakota, challenging a ban on minors accessing trans healthcare. This case was filed about two years ago, and it just went to a bench trial, meaning it was heard by only a judge in North Dakota last week.

Very lucky to the people of North Dakota, there’s a wonderful local journalist by the name of Mary Steurer who has been following the case for the last two years, and attended each and every day of the seven day bench trial. And each day after court, she submitted a story where there were photographs taken straight from the courtroom of the witnesses that were not anonymous, and describing what happened for the day.

And it’s not just passive recording that Mary did; it’s really critical reporting. She picked up on reporting in other states where the same witnesses testified. She shared long summaries of witness testimonies for the day. And my understanding is her reporting was so good that the two other major newspapers in North Dakota ran all of her daily reports on their front pages.

JJ: Yeah, Mary Steurer writes for the North Dakota Monitor. I looked through that reporting on your recommendation, and it really was straightforward, just being there in the room, bringing in relevant information. It just was strange, in a way, how refreshing it was to see such straightforward reporting. She would mention that a certain person made a statement about medical things, and she’d quote it, but then say, “Actually, this is an outlying view in the medical community,” which is relevant background information that another reporter might not have included. So I do want to say, just straightforward reporting can be such sunlight on a story like this.

EY: Yes, and especially I appreciate that Mary is local to North Dakota. She’s not an outsider parachuting in for a trial that might otherwise be overly sensationalized. This is a North Dakotan covering a North Dakota case in Bismarck, and she’s really speaking to the sensibilities of North Dakotans, and what they want to know about a case like this, not what outsiders like me from New York might think.

JJ: Let me just ask you, Ezra, while I have you, forward-looking thoughts. I’ve heard you say these moves are not legal, these executive orders are not legal, they can be stopped, people are engaged in stopping them. Are there things you’d look for journalists to be doing right now, or for other folks to be doing right now, that can make sure that goes forward in the way that we want it to?

EY: For journalists, I’d recommend that you cast a wide net to understand all of the actions that are happening, and all of the lawsuits that are happening. A lot of journalists at the national level, at the very least, do really reactive reporting. So within a few minutes of an executive order coming out, they’ll talk to the same activists that they always talk to on both sides. They’ll talk to a lawyer who has no idea what this area of law is, just to get a quote in, and then they move on.

I think it would be helpful for Americans, and trans Americans especially, to know there’s more going on in our fight than being reactive to nonsense executive orders.

As one example, I filed suit against the US Office of Personnel Management yesterday, on behalf of my client Manning, a former federal employee challenging the federal government’s health benefits plans’ decades-long trans exclusions in healthcare. This is a case that captures the long arc of the struggle for trans rights. It started 10 years ago, and ironically enough, the only administration that was supportive of Mr. Manning’s bid was Mr. Trump.

JJ: That is odd.

EY: But here we are in court again.

JJ: All right then, so cast a wide net, and don’t just look at the most recent thing that’s come down the pike, because that will just have all of our heads spinning, and take our eyes off the prize.

EY: And talk to different voices, not just the same activists, not just the same lawyers, not just the same parents, not just the same kids. There are a lot of trans people. We’re not a monolith. We have different views and interests, and different experiences, and you won’t capture that if you just talk to the same talking heads.

JJ: All right, then. We’ve been speaking with civil rights attorney Ezra Young. You can follow his work at EzraYoung.com. Thank you so much for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

EY: Thank you so much, Janine.

 

Janine Jackson interviewed Dartmouth-based Anne Sosin about Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and rural health for the February 7, 2025, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin250207Sosin.mp3

 

The Hill (1/13/25)

Janine Jackson: A Senate panel voted narrowly this week to advance the nomination of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. for secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services. Kennedy has been emphatically opposed by a range of public health experts for reasons including, but not limited to, his stated belief that vaccines have “poisoned an entire generation of American children.” Yes, his children are vaccinated, but he wishes he “could go back in time” and undo that.

Also, that Covid-19 is targeted to attack Caucasians and Black people, while Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese are most immune; that the HPV vaccine causes a higher death risk than the cancer it prevents; that fluoride causes IQ loss; that Vitamin A and chicken soup are cures for measles; that AIDS is not caused by HIV; and that we had almost no school shootings until the introduction of Prozac.

Nevertheless, Kennedy may soon be overseeing Medicare, Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act, coordinating the public health response to epidemics, as well as the approval process for pharmaceuticals, vaccines and supplies.

Our guest says RFK Jr is absolutely a threat to public health, but nixing his nomination is not the same thing as meaningfully engaging the problems that lead people to support him.

Anne Sosin is a public health researcher and practitioner based at Dartmouth College. She joins us now by phone. Welcome to CounterSpin, Anne Sosin.

Anne Sosin: Thank you so much for having me on the show.

FAIR.org (12/5/24)

JJ: There are a number of people, in lots of places, who have centered their lives perforce on concerns around food and health and medicine. And they see a guy who seems to be challenging Big Pharma, who’s saying food additives are problematic, who’s questioning government agencies. There are a lot of people who are so skeptical of the US healthcare and drug system that a disruptor, even if it’s somebody who says a worm ate his brain—that sounds better than business as usual. And so that’s leading some people to think, well, maybe we can pick out some good ideas here, maybe. But you think that is the wrong approach to RFK Jr.

AS: I think that that’s misguided. Certainly, there are some people who see RFK as a vehicle for championing their causes. And there are other people who think that we should seek common ground with RFK, that we should acquiesce, perhaps, on certain issues, and then work together to advance some other causes.

And I think that that’s misguided. I think we need to recognize what’s given rise to RFK and other extreme figures right now, but we need to make common cause with the communities that he’s exploiting in advancing his own personal and political goals.

JJ: And in particular, you’re thinking about rural communities, which have played a role here, right? What’s going on there?

AS: Yes. My work is centered in rural communities right now, and I think we need to understand the political economy that’s given rise to RFK and other figures—the social, economic, cultural and political changes that have given him a wide landing strip in rural places, as well as some of the institutional vacuums that RFK and other very extreme and polarizing figures are filling.

JJ: Expand on that, please, a little.

Anne Sosin: “Resistance to public health measures often, in my view, reflects unmet need.”

AS: So we’re seeing growing resistance in some places, including rural communities, to public health and interventions that have long been in place, including vaccination and fluoridation. And resistance to public health measures often, in my view, reflects unmet need.

Sometimes those needs are material. We see that people resist or don’t follow public health programs or guidance because they don’t have their material needs met. And those material needs might be housing, paid leave or other supports that they need. But the unmet need might also be emotional or affective, that some people may resist out of a sense of economic or social dislocation, a feeling of invisibility, or something else. And those feelings get expressed as resistance to public health measures that are in place.

And so understanding and recognizing what those unmet needs are is really important. And then thinking about how do we address those needs in ways that are productive, and don’t undermine public health and healthcare, is really important.

JJ: Vaccinations are obviously a big concern here, particularly as we may be going into another big public health concern with bird flu. So the idea that vaccines cause disease is difficult to grapple with, from a public health perspective. Vaccines can’t be a “choose your own adventure” if they’re going to work societally. And it almost seems like, around vaccination, we’re losing the concept of what public health means, and how it’s not about whether or not you decide to eat cheese, you know? There’s kind of a public understanding issue here.

AS: I think you’re correct. I think we’ve seen, just in the US, an increasing DIYification of public health, a loss of the recognition that public health means all of us. Public health is the things that we do together to advance our collective health. And the increased focus on individual decision-making really threatens all of us.

NPR (5/12/21)

And we look for it around vaccination: We have seen very well-funded initiatives to undermine public confidence in vaccination over the last several years. There has been a lot of money spent to dismantle public support and public confidence in vaccination and other lifesaving measures. And it really poses a grave threat, as we think about not only novel threats like H5N1, but also things that have long been under control.

JJ: Finally, I took a quick look at major national media and rural healthcare, and there wasn’t nothing. I saw a piece from the Dayton Daily News about heart disease in the rural South, and how public health researchers are running a medical trailer around the area to test heart and lung function. I saw a piece from the Elko Daily Free Press in Nevada about how Elko County and others are reliant on nonprofits to fill gaps in access to care, and that’s partly due to poor communication between state agencies and local providers.

And I really appreciate local reporting; local reporting is life. But some healthcare issues, and certainly some of those that would be impacted by the head of HHS, are broader, and they require a broad understanding of the impact of policy on lots of communities. And I just wonder, is there something you would like to see news media do more of that they’re missing? Is there something you’d like them to see less of, as they try to engage these issues, as they will, in days going forward?

AS: Certainly local coverage is essential, and I’m really pleased when I see local coverage of the heroic work that many rural healthcare providers and community leaders are delivering. We see very creative and innovative work happening in our rural region, in our research, in our community engagement. And so it’s very encouraging when I see that covered.

But all of the efforts on the ground are shaped by a larger policy landscape and a larger media landscape, larger political landscape. And what we see, often, is efforts to undermine the policies that are critical to preserving our rural healthcare infrastructure. We see well-funded media efforts to erode social cohesion, to undermine our community institutions, to sow mistrust in measures such as vaccination. We see other work to harden the divisions between urban and rural America, and within rural places.

And so I hope that media will pay attention to the larger forces that are shaping the landscape of rural life, and not just see the outcome. It’s easy to take note of the disparities between urban and rural places, but it’s much harder to do the deep and complex work of understanding the forces that generate those uneven outcomes across geographic differences.

JJ: All right, well, we’ll end on that important point.

We’ve been speaking with Anne Sosin, public health researcher and practitioner based at Dartmouth College. Anne Sosin, thank you so much for joining us today on CounterSpin.

AS: Thank you for the invitation.